So I received my invite to Google Wave a week ago and have been playing it off and on ever since. It's a fascinating platform, not quite what I expected, and it's been really interesting to think about the potential applications and uses of the platform. My initial impression after logging in was that it was a typical Google app, visually very clean, colorful and smooth. I got an idea of ​​how things worked by watching their technical demonstration video, so I started playing with creating and joining waves. For those of you who aren't as passionate about this topic as I am, "waves" are the individual threads (documents?) that the platform is designed to create and share. The wave can be yours alone, which would make it functionally similar to an Office document, or you can collaborate by inviting other users to join the wave or by making it public. Once a wave has multiple users, users can edit the wave itself, either by editing the "base" wave or by adding comments, discussion threads, links, or other media. Each of these individual additions also has its own privacy settings, so if I wanted to comment on a wave but wanted only the original author of the wave to see my comment, I could do that. The wave itself remembers each of these changes and the order in which they occurred, so all the waves can be "played" so the user can see how the document has evolved to the state it is in now. It goes without saying that Wave is very community oriented. As a simple document creator/editor it's a decent tool, but Google Docs provides a much more versatile and stable interface. Maybe this will change in the future, but it seems like that's not the main focus of the Wave team here. As such, it's not very fun... middle of paper... purposes and family, such as allowing the existence of virtual "family albums" that could be easily updated from anywhere by anyone invited .Wave is an amazing platform with huge potential and I like what I've seen so far, but it's still very rough. There is no easy undo function and Ctrl+Z doesn't work, which can be very irritating. The service can be slow and occasionally crash (although it has really cool error screens). It still lacks a lot and has a learning curve, so if you're a casual user, you'll want to give Google a little more time to perfect it before trying it out for yourself. However, if you're dying to find out how Wave works, or are simply a glutton for geeky punishment, I have a few invitations left and could be persuaded to hand them out. You can contact me from the contact form on the sidebar or contact me on Twitter.