Google Wave and 100,000 Invites

I have been looking forward for the Google Wave release and I got a little frustrated when I missed to sign-up on the developer preview they offered before. Google Wave is said to be a collaborative platform and I am not only a big fan of Digital Collaboration; but it is my career. I am itching to make that comparison between Google Wave and SharePoint and see if they can interact with each other through the APIs.

Anyways, Google has announced they are releasing around 100,000 invitations to preview the Google wave. Those invitations are most likely to be sent out to developers who were actively participating in the developer preview back in June, the first customers who signed up and offered to give feedback on Google wave and some select customers of Google Apps.

Those initial invites would later be asked to nominate their friends and family to join the Google Wave preview since they content that Google Wave becomes more useful when you have friends and family on it. Since it is a collaboration tool then it is a requirement to have colleagues, family and friends to collaborate with. If all goes well, Google Wave team says they will invite more people into the preview.

The team says that right from the start they have focused on building Google for scalability, stability and speed and usability. They have a very strong opponent in SharePoint and they need to build a kickass application. Their collaboration platform might easily make it to the consumer market but if they want to see enterprise scale implementation of this application, they need to make sure this can compete with the heavyweight SharePoint.

However, the team is quick to say that occasional crashes can happen and they would try their best to fix these issues and improve upon their product. Google Wave would not only be used for personal activities but it should provide improvements in productivity through better communication and collaboration. The team says they have been using Google Wave for planning, sharing photos, managing release processes, debate of features, writing design documents and other business tasks.

The announcement for those 100,000 people who would be chosen to participate in this activity would begin on September 30. I hope thousands of people who are given the invite would not confirm and Google opens up more invitations to people other than those outlined above. I missed signing-up for developers preview, and I missed joining the Google Wave feedbacks to receive invitation for the preview.

Anyways, I would watching closely the features and happenings on this space as Digital Collaboration is and would always be part of me.

Image from Google.