So the invites for the beta started flowing out apaprently, yet I haven't seen a thread about it. Does that mean it's just... meh? I don't have an invite, but am very interested in knowing what it's like. So to anyone who got an invite and has exerienced it, what's it like?

I was wondering at the lack of a thread too, figured people here were still waiting for an invite. Supposedly there are some on the way for us on the GDNet Ops team (thx CaffieneAddict!) but they have yet to arrive. Supposedly the Wave team is clicking through all the invites by hand, so understandably it could be a day or so more. Rest assured we'll be letting everyone know how it is - should be an awesome tool for us

Quote: Original post by Gaiiden
Supposedly the Wave team is clicking through all the invites by hand, so understandably it could be a day or so more.

It certainly seems like it...I mean, sending out a mere 100k emails to mostly-GMail addresses shouldn't take "many many many many hours."

I came pretty late to the party, well after the initial hype, so I still have no invite. But I have some neat ideas for Mercurial integration and exporting structured data (tools specifically for game design/development) that I'm eager to get started on...

So right now I'm poking around in the PyGoWave code and seeing if I can help turn that into something usable.

No problem, they invites are in Google's hands now :-p. I've played around with it a bit and it's...interesting, but I'm not completely sold on it being the next best thing. I suppose I'll have to wait and reserve judgment until people actually start using it and making cool stuff happen with it. And I'm out of invitations (was given 8 initially) so sorry, but don't bother asking :)

Quote: Original post by drakostar

Quote: Original post by Gaiiden
Supposedly the Wave team is clicking through all the invites by hand, so understandably it could be a day or so more.

It certainly seems like it...I mean, sending out a mere 100k emails to mostly-GMail addresses shouldn't take "many many many many hours."

I suspect the slowness in invites appearing is more due to a gradual rollout (which they usually do with any major new features/changes to their webapps) rather than any manual bottleneck. I certainly can't imagine google of all places doing it by hand.

From what I've heard it's still very, very early alpha so it's a bit all over the place performance and reliability wise, but i'm still pretty interested to see what can/will be done with it.

Quote: Original post by caffeineaddict
No problem, they invites are in Google's hands now :-p. I've played around with it a bit and it's...interesting, but I'm not completely sold on it being the next best thing. I suppose I'll have to wait and reserve judgment until people actually start using it and making cool stuff happen with it. And I'm out of invitations (was given 8 initially) so sorry, but don't bother asking :)

Yea, I'm sure it would be more interesting if you had lots of ppl to collaborate with on something. Try this: The First Google Wave Search You Must Know

@OrangyTang - agreed, that totally makes sense

I'm anxious to see how I can integrate it into my own sites. I'd certainly appreciate an invite, if anyone is able to send one my way!

My friend sent me an invite and I got it about 50 hours later, which isn't too bad given how big a backlog there supposedly is.

I'm not sold on the idea, though; just looks like more Web 2.0 wankery and I don't see how it is supposed to rival or replace services I'm already using. It just feels like somebody went to a Hackday, took Google's services and mashed them together onto one interface and I fail to see how that is innovation or progress.

Am I missing something or is it generally not that great?

Quote: Original post by ukdeveloper
Am I missing something

It's an open protocol and an application platform. That's the cool part. "Vanilla" Wave is next to worthless; it's when you understand the potential of robots and gadgets on top of a great collaboration/communication protocol that it starts getting exciting.

Quote: or is it generally not that great?

Oh, it totally sucks right now. It's slow (even on Chrome), missing tons of features, and generally buggy and incomplete everywhere. It's nowhere near Google beta quality yet. Try it again in a few months when it should be more stable and have more cool stuff written for it.

IMO, they shoulda just keep pulling from the dev signups, and ignore the general user queue for now. Because now you have idiots like Robert Scoble whining about how much it sucks because it isn't Twitter. Gina Trapani gets it; you have to approach Wave as a developer.

Quote:
I'm not sold on the idea, though; just looks like more Web 2.0 wankery and I don't see how it is supposed to rival or replace services I'm already using.

I agree with this.

I got an invite from a friend a while back, mainly out of curiosity. I think Google has done a spectacularly poor job of marketing the thing (I realize it's a "beta" but let's be serious here, that means a 1.0-ish launch for which they can gather both initial feedback and a critical user mass).

I've got hearsay that it's some kind of collaboration / project management "thing." I've been linked a pair of videos by Google about it, both of which are epic 45-minutes-to-an-hour presentations about it, which I didn't watch because why the hell would I spend that much time on it?

Finally, they are releasing very limited beta invites which -- while I understand the technical rationale behind it -- doesn't make sense for what I thought was a project management thing. After all, their method of rationing doesn't seem to easily allow me to see how well Promit, Mike, Washu and I could collaborate on SlimDX development since I can't get them in yet.

I finally get an invite and log in and it looks like GMail with more cloudy Web 2.0 AJAXoff and CSSex. And a "with:public" search that appears to rival Twitter's public timeline in its ability to make me think the service is full of crap. Now, I ended up liking Twitter, so maybe this will prove itself useful in the long run, but so far I don't see it competing with any other things I use that provide similar services.