Wednesday September 30, 2009 – mark that on your calendar folks and if you were among those that signed up right after Google Wave was announced it might be the time to keep a real close eye on your e-mail inbox.
This is because the first 100,000 people are going to be getting their invites to join the Google Wave preview around that time. It is also the day that Google will be moving Wave from its temporary sandbox to its new home at wave.google.com. This is according to the post on the official Google blog and of course the rising numbers of tech blogs announcing the news.
Even though Google is rolling out this early preview they are quick to let everyone know that it still isn’t ready for prime time. As well there are some key features that they still have to fully implement since much of the Wave team’s efforts since the original announcement back in May has been focused on scalability (a good thing), stability, speed and usability.
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.
I know I signed up right after watching the original announcement video but I doubt I will be among the first 100,000 to get a shot at playing with Wave; but if I do I’ll make sure to let you know all about it.
