November 2, 2009:

Google Wave

We all know how important Waving is to MINI owners (at least, it used to be) … now there’s a whole new sort of Wave, from Google! I received an invite to sign up recently – it was sent to my office email but when I clicked the link, it signed up my personal email address instead! Apparently it links to your Google webpage account signin, not whatever email the invite was sent to (silly).
So, now I can Wave at people:

But who to Wave at? You can’t contact anyone that doesn’t have a Wave account – you can send invites (maximum of 20), but it warns that invites might take a while to get sent; so meanwhile, I’m left with Waveing to myself
Except curiously, the contacts panel lists one name that sounds suspiciously like a MINI owner … if it is, then it means that Google Wave trawls your Gmail contacts, looking for anyone you know that also has a Wave account. Helpful, I guess.

From what I’ve seen of Google Wave, it could be quite useful during MINIsOnTop planning and similar activities. Don’t see a benefit to replacing regular email – but on the other hand there’s surely a benefit in simply merging Gmail with Google Wave to give a single user interface for communications with other people.

Google Wave so far though, is not much use to me. With no-one to test it with, and as you see in the screenshot above a missing Google Wave In Action video, I’m left with not much to explore.

UPDATE: It’s broken for me, already – apparently I have “1 to 36 of lots” of Waves in my inbox, and all of them are empty!

Anyone else tried it, yet?