Wave invites are going out! Have you gotten yours yet?

September 30, 2009 By 20 Comments

According to Google, Wave invites have started going out!  It’ll take “many many many many” hours for all of the invites to go out, but they’re on the way.

The big question: Have you gotten yours yet? Let us know in the poll below.

If you never applied for an invite, or if you don’t end up getting one, you can use our message board to request one.  If you’re one of the lucky ones that gets an invite (and you therefore have eight extra invites to give away), visit the forums and help some people out.

Have you received your Google Wave invite yet?(online surveys)

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: , ,

Wave invites coming later in the day

September 30, 2009 By 1 Comment

I know many of you are anxious to get your hands on a Google Wave invite, and it seems that they’ll be sent out pretty soon.  According to Stephanie Hannon, a member of the Wave team, they’re waiting a few more hours for the team (many of whom are located in Sydney) to be ready to handle any support issues.  Specifically, she says:

Invites will go out late in the day US time on Sept 30 – we are in Sydney and want to be awake to support you all!

They’re in Australia, which is 14 hours ahead of Eastern US time.  It’s nearly 2pm as I write this post, and it’s nearing 4am in Sydney.  I’m not sure what time they’ll start releasing the invites, but I’d guess they’d start around 8am, which would be 6pm EST.  We’ll keep you updated via our Twitter account (@GoogleWaveInfo) as we learn more.

In the meantime, embedded below is a nice video the Wave team has created to show a general overview of how it works.  It’s not as in-depth as the 90-minute video many of you have watched, but it summarizes the main features of Wave in just under 8 minutes.  This is a great video to pass along to your friends that keep asking “What does Google Wave do?”:

Filed Under: General News, Videos

Google Wave opening to 100,000+ users today!

September 29, 2009 By 3 Comments

[Update: TechCrunch has revised their statement and Wave will not be launching until tomorrow, September 30.  Google confirms this on their blog. One more day to wait...]

According to TechCrunch, Google will open Wave up to 100,000 new users starting today — not tomorrow, as we had initially thought.

Some highlights:

  • 100,000 new users will get accounts.
  • Those users will be mostly from three groups: The public users who signed up early to test, developers, and a select group of Google Apps users.
  • Every user that gets an invite today will be given 8 more invites to hand out to friends!  However, those people will not (yet) get extra invites to hand out.
  • Wave will be moving out of the “sandbox” site and onto the normal wave.google.com address.

I’ve not seen any invites go out quite yet, but it sounds like their coming soon.  Let us know in the comments when you see yours!

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: ,

New Google Chorme Plug-in is made for Google Wave

September 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment

When I first heard about the new Google Chrome plugin for Internet Explorer this morning, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  I’m a huge Chrome fan, but didn’t see why it was such a huge deal that you could run Chrome through IE.  Now I get it.

One week from tomorrow, Google Wave will be opening up to 100,000 users.  According to the Chrome team, Internet Explorer simply can’t handle technologies associated with HTML5 or handle JavaScript efficiently enough.  Before IE users will be allowed to use Wave, they’ll be forced to install the plug-in (or use an alternate browser).

wave-chrome-ieWhile most of us can (and do) use browsers other than Internet Explorer, many people in corporate environments don’t have the ability to do that.  This plug-in takes care of that for them, and should give them a great way to use Google Wave.  If you’d like to see developer’s information about the Chrome Frame, you can get it here.

Filed Under: Browsers Tagged With: , , ,

Embedding Waves with the WordPress Plugin

September 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

We’re three weeks away from the day that Google really starts opening Wave up, and Mashable has a great article about one cool aspect of Waves — embedding them in sites.

There’ll be a variety of ways you can do it, but one very easy way will be using a plugin for WordPress called “Wavr”.  Once you install that plugin, you simply use the following code to embed one in your post:

[wave id="wave-id"]

You’ll be able to change some options in the settings for fonts and colors, too.

The problem at this point is that you can only see embedded waves if you have access to a dev account for Wave.  Over time, that will change and these will suddenly get very useful.  If you’ve got access already, check out this post to see what it looks like.  If not, check out the screenshot below to see what an embedded wave looks like:

wave-embed

Filed Under: General News, Uses Tagged With: , , ,

Google Wave will open up to some Google Apps users this fall

September 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Google has just announced that they’ll be opening up Wave to some Google Apps users this fall, and all of them by next year.  Their statement:

Today we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be opening up access to Google Wave for some schools and businesses as part of the preview this fall. And while we won’t be able to open it up to all Google Apps users just yet, we hope to bring Google Wave to all Google Apps users next year. If you’re a Google Apps administrator and you’re interested in testing Google Wave, you can sign up here.

I would assume that this is some of the 100,000 users that they have said will be getting access on September 30, though they didn’t specifically address that date with this update.  We’ll find out soon enough, I guess.

Filed Under: General News Tagged With: ,