Google Wave Invites Pouring

In my previous article I had mentioned me receiving invitation from Google for my Wave account on 30th October 2009. While I was expecting Google to send out next round of invites towards end of November 2009, they have proved me wrong. It seems they have sent another round of invites on 14th November 2009. Though this could be a part of delayed invitation process they started on 30th October 2009, what seems to be a coincidence is 2 of my friends ended up receiving their invitations yesterday.

This surely is a positive step coz most of the Google Wave account holders have been complaining about limited contacts in their Wave account thereby limiting their usage of Google Wave and at the same time many experts felt that Wave was loosing its fizz. Maybe its time Google went aggressive and offered invites to many more people.

Happy Waving!

More Google Wave invites.

As pointed out in one of my earlier posts, since the launch of Google Wave on 30th September 2009, Google has sent another round of Wave invites.

I was lucky enough to receive my own Wave invite from Google yesterday. This is exactly the same modus operandi which we had witnessed when Gmail was launched. In the coming year or so there is a high possibility that at least 50-55 percent of Gmail users will have their own Wave account.

Gmail has about 150 million users worldwide and with 20 additional Google Wave invites allowed per account, it wont take much time for Google to get their entire Gmail users to move to Wave. But lets not get too excited coz these invites will be sent by Google in a phased manner. There are also talks of Google replenishing invites of existing Wave users who have exhausted their earlier quota of invites.

One of the most notable things seen in the image above is 20 permissible invites which is up from 8 permissible invites at the time of launch. Also, for those who may not know email id for wave accounts are xyz@googlewave.com

Happy waving!

Will Gmail sink in the Wave?

On 27th May 2009 Google publicly demonstrated Google Wave for the first time at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. This product was touted as "the email of the future". With Google Wave, Google tried to reinvent the inbox, blend e-mail, instant messaging and many more features. The very basic premise on which this product was born was how email would look if it was born today instead of 50 years back.

Now that the baby is born and we are looking at the possible present form of email service, would Google go ahead and kill Gmail? In the long run it would obviously not make any sense for Google to run 2 different websites. Promoting 2 separate brands offering the same core value is always gonna be a costly affair. Look at Android, after launching it Google decided to have Chrome OS. Eventually it will just have Chrome as their standard OS for all the platforms.

Make no mistakes, I am not suggesting that Google will replace our email ids to xyz@gwave.com coz replacing millions of email ids would be a daunting task. What we may end up witnessing is a convergence of Wave and Gmail. To make Google Wave universally acceptable, Google may discontinue www.gmail.com and force us to visit wave.google.com for login. This maybe the only change, but this one change may be bring up huge opportunities for Google. It may help them beat Yahoo, MSN, etc. in IM service. It may help them manage the increasing threat from facebook and twitter.

So is it time to say bye bye Gmail???

Bid for your Google Wave invite

With Google supposedly have rolled out about 1,00,000 invites today to access Wave, many not so fortunate can try and bid to get an invite.

Currently on ebay.com we have a seller who has offered to sell his Google Wave invite the current bid for which stands at $157.50 with about 31 bids. There are still 2 days left for the bid however if you are crazy enough to quote a much higher price, the seller is ready to negotiate offline.



Though Terms & Conditions of Google Wave clearly prohibit users from selling or trading the services for any commercial gains only time will tell if such bids/ listings get retracted and cancelled by ebay.

Seems the Google Wave craze has already begun.