Last week I finally received my invite to Google Wave and I have not been able to test it the way I wanted to. The problem is that Google has stopped allowing new invitees to be able to send out invites to others. I think they are on a limited basis with some people but for the most part they are not. A while back, I followed Steph Hannon on Twitter, one of the project managers for Google Wave. On October 9th, 2009 she Tweeted the following message…
Recent invitees do not get to invite others. We will grow from sign-ups and the invite queue. Active users might get invite wave later …
Unfortunately, I received my invite after this date so I am unable to send any invites. In fact, I have been disappointed that I cannot even invite my own family or friends so that I can effectively test it. I do have five contacts that are members as well so I can use it a little. For the record, I do understand this is a limited beta that is not open to the public so I do not want to come across as whining.
So far, I am very satisfied with the functions such as dragging and dropping pictures, Word documents, pdf files, etc directly into the Wave. It does run pretty fast with immediate updates character by character when the other person types. It is sort of impressive considering it is just in beta status. By definition, being in beta testing, it is supposed to have some flakiness and random crashes. By limiting the users, the proliferation of this beta version is slowly rolled out. If they did not do this, it would likely be overwhelmed by the massive number people due to the massive amount of hype it has received.
My first observation of the service is mixed because it has tons of potential while if you have many people in the conversation, it can be overwhelming. I think this service will be wonderful if you are communicating with five or less people simultaneously. If you have more people than this in a single Wave, it could become so busy that you get lost. My negative feelings are solidly outweighed by the positive.
The incredible amount of attention this service has received can be good or bad. Let’s just hope that all the attention stays until the service becomes open to the public. There has been so much attention that many people forget that it is a beta service. People may hear about it so much that they get impatient waiting for an invite. I will have to be honest that I have become impatient myself. Ever since Google Wave announced this upcoming service in May 2009, I signed up for an invite. It took until October for me to get one. This is not a bad thing on Google as much as it is on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.
These social sites, have been buzzing for so long in almost an elitist fashion. If you have been a bystander in all this, it seemed as though many people were boasting in a way that seemed like they were better human beings just because they had an invite. Now we know this is not true, but the atmosphere surrounding it, made me become a little frustrated to the point that I was bashing the service in these social networking sites. For this reason, I think it may be a good idea to not release the news of new services to the public until they are closer to release date. Is it possible that people can become so overwhelmed with the hype that it can never live up to it? I think it can.
I hope they can finish up their beta testing very soon before this happens because all the excitement can be lost if too much time elapses. I am very excited for this service while I am also frustrated that my family and friends do not have it. It is sort of like someone buys you a brand new car that you can only drive by yourself in the desert when no one else is around. The future of this service could be very good because the way I hear it, Google plans on making it open source so that other companies can use it in their own systems. this sounds very promising. The reality of this optimism has yet to be seen. I will keep you up to date as this system evolves.
Tags: beta testing, Google Wave, hype, invites