Google wave

I'm in but have no more invites. Actually, you just request an invite to be queued, or something like that. No one I invited has actually received anything yet anyway.

It's an odd beast, doesn't seem to perform too well in my FF3.5 - scrollbars are some weird new widget, I see lag times doing basic clicks. It doesn't feel ready for prime time, and I've got a hard time seeing just where this is going to be useful on a large scale.

Let me rephrase that. I see many potential uses for it, but that's just it - potential. I think it'd be great for workgroups and internal company groups. I think it may be very useful in 'townhall' style meetings - large and small scale.

I don't think this will replace existing customer service avenues overnight, for example. We've had IRC for decades, and IM for a long time, but most people still don't cope well with 'real time' anything in the real world. *technical* people tend to, and people whose livelihood depends on realtime comm. Lots of people don't, and find real-time distracting.

I just went back to my wave account after 2 weeks, and there wasn't a whole lot of useful stuff. There *might* have been, but I can't find it - the interface is set up to have the primary usefulness be when used in realtime.

Interface changes, code fixes, speed improvements, and most of all far more people may make this a useful tool. It hasn't hit critical mass in terms of users to even determine if it's going to be useful. As it stands right now, it hasn't made one difference in how I live my life. Email, IM, IRC, Skype and others all had an immediate impact on my life - almost from day 1, and certainly within a few weeks. Wave has failed to do that for me so far.