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Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update
September 29, 2009
Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:
Developers who have been active in the
developer preview
we started back in June
The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on
wave.google.com
Select business and university customers of
Google Apps
We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.
Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since
first unveiling
the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.
There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.
Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.
Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on
producing his Chicago Sun-Times column
, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on
streamlining the movie-making process
, scientist Cameron Neylon on
academic papers
and
lab work
, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on
collaborative business process modelling
, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a
host of enterprise use cases
.
The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we...
Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing
developer preview
. It has been great fun to see the
cool extensions already built or being planned
and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our
developer blog
.
Happy waving!
Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Engineering Manager & Stephanie Hannon, Group Product Manager
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