I got my Wave invite, it’s party time!

This weekend there was this awesome mail in my mailbox comming from wave-noreply@gmail.com.
The subject? “Your invitation to preview Google Wave”
Guess what, it was my Google Wave invite!
Here’s the mail:

From:     wave-noreply@google.com
To:     Me
Subject:     Your invitation to preview Google Wave
Date:     Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:01:52 +0000 (23:01 CEST)

Google    wave
preview
Check out the videos and example waves
* Invite others to join you
*
Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We’re happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product.

To accept your invitation, sign into Google Wave at the following link*:
https://wave.google.com/wave/invite?a=pre&wtok=4af57blablalblaalla13&wsig=ABk8uhSmlkmlieodqsfqdErsQTtjw
(If you do not have a Google account, you will be prompted to create one)

Once you’ve signed in:

Happy waving!
The Google Wave Team

For help, please visit http://www.google.com/support/wave

* This link will only work for one invitation to Google Wave, it cannot be shared!

Copyright 2009. Google Inc, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.

So now I got my Wave account, but there are no people in it, yet.
For now, I won’t be able to test that many things as a communication platform is quite useless without contacts.
But as my friends & family starts accepting the invites I send out, it’ll be a great experience.

Every accounts seems to start with 20 invites, but they’re not send out immediately.
The reason is quite obvious:

Invite others to Google Wave

Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Happy waving!

The welcome message includes an introducing video to the Wave platform.
A quite nice way for a multi-billion company to introduce a new product 😀

The battle for a google wave invite has started

google_waveIn about 3 to 6 hours, Google Will start sending out 100.000 free Google Wave invites to people already using the sandbox and the ones who offered to help report bugs.
They already announced this on their blog on 20 july.

You might recognise this way of selling their product from the Gmail launch.
By using the invite-system they create some kind of temporary ‘exclusive’ product, and it works!
Back in the time when Gmail was launched, people sold their accounts for huge amounts of money, or traded the invites for a cell-phone.

I wonder if they’ll have the same result with their Wave-invite scheme.
As things are going now, it seems like it’ll be a success.
On Reddit, each topic on Google Wave is resulting in a mass request for invites.
Ofc, Twitter has the Google Wave plague too…
They’re even getting trough to eBay (at the time of writing, at $202 with FREE SHIPPING).
But I guess these guys are pure scams, as there are no invites send yet!)

I just can’t wait to get my hands on to this service, but I won’t pay for it.
In a few months we all get a bunch of free invites to give away…. Don’t forget they’ll try to conquer the internet with this.
To get to this, they’ll have to provite enough invites for the whole world!

So for those not getting the invite, be patiënt…. (I’m more talking to myself right here 😉

[Update] Websites’s put up for sharing invites or people selling invites are pure scams (if they’re still running their service)!
The Google Wave team has confirmed that they’re not allowing anyone to share invites.
You can read so on the twitter status of one of the mayor developers: twaphanie