Google Wave Invite

If you are wondering what is all the brouhaha about Google Wave and Google Wave invites, keep reading to know all about it. Here you will also find an explanation of how Google Wave works.

What is Google Wave?
What started as just the 'Google Search Engine', started by Larry Page and Sergey Brin is today an Internet behemoth with a mission to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful' and I daresay they are well on their way to achieve that goal. As part of this mission, Google decided to launch 'Google Wave'. It is a web based platform for real time interaction and online collaboration. Google wave is a platform that offers social networking, email, instant messaging, real time collaboration facility with spell check, translation (in 40 languages) and other extensions. It is all of these things bundled into one package.

Fundamental to this application is the concept of a 'wave'. A wave is a conversation, as well as a document at the same time that is edited and modified with every new action. It is actually an XML document. Multiple users can be added to a wave and every one of them can edit and modify its contents, giving it the characteristics of a 'wiki' in the process. This web application was created by Google developers and written in Java on the OpenJDK platform. Its interface is based on 'Google Web Toolkit'.

About Invites
Google Wave was initially released in the beta phase, only to a select set of developers and later to about 100,000 users worldwide. After keeping the whole project under wraps for quite some time, Google opened up a page where people could request participation and be a part of Google wave. On November 2009, requests were accepted and the users were given an option to send a limited number of invites to other people.

This was similar to the launch of Gmail beta, which was earlier made available only through invites. So much was the hype about Google Wave then, that these invites became coveted possessions and they were even sold on online auction sites. It was a thing that everyone wanted, though very few had an idea about what it is all about. Delay caused anxiety among netizens all over the world. Then finally the day came when the madness and need for invites disappeared as Google made the application openly available to all.

Google Wave is Open to All Now.
If you are wondering how to get an invite, then rest easy as you don't need it anymore. It is open to one and all now. Any netizen can now be a part of it. After the brouhaha subsided, many users who finally got those invites and started using the application were disillusioned. There was nothing really new for the average user. It is useful to geeks, developers and businessmen who need to collaborate on projects but for the common netizen, there was nothing really new that was offered. Most never understood how the interface worked and how they could benefit from the application as it was too geeky for their liking perhaps. However, there was also a large section of users who largely benefited from this platform and gave positive reviews about it too. Personally, I was not impressed as all that Google Wave offered was already made possible through Gmail and other online applications.

Now that Google has made it available to everybody, you don't need an invitation to join the party. Just visit the Google Wave page and sign in with your Gmail account login name or create a new account to start making waves online.