It seems to me that the entire key to having this whole thing work out is if we have as many of these as possible. I think it's great that these guys were willing to put in the effort before Google even brought their product to market. We're looking at a parallel dual network effect here: the product/client (ie, barring any unforeseen, giant occurrences, Google's client) will only take off if it manages to establish a large userbase for an unproven product. BUT: Wave, as a protocol, as a server type—as a web technology rather than a Google tool—will only take off if it manages to establish a large codebase of clients and servers for an unproven protocol. As far as I can tell the one thing that will have the biggest effect in a) ensuring Wave's success and b) actually IMPROVING Wave and shaping it according to the needs of the web at large is if as many people as possible do what PyGo has just done first.
EXTREMELY minimal, but I really like the openness and availability. At the very least, it's a good way to test your own gadgets. I'll certainly be playing with this more during the next few weeks.
This is all I get after registering:
Account activation
Sorry, your account could not be activated. I don't care why this happened.
I skimmed the original story when it came out but this wave thing just hasn't grabbed me. Can someone give an elevator pitch for what's exciting about it, please?
edit uh, this http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-wave.html makes it sound like a "realtime wiki." Isn't that very similar to Y-com's http://etherpad.com/, that pg now uses to write his essays, and has (or had) patents on part of the tech?
Is there a way to see which users are currently online on his test server so we can add them to our waves and help eachother test/play with gadgets?
Noscript plays merry hell with the gadgets, to be expected I suppose.
I was hoping the realtime chat/wiki environment would be implemented but if it is I can't find it.
Guess that puts the lie to Ray Ozzie's criticism that it's too complex for anyone to do an implementation of.