Updated! Please see this post.

This week Google announced that it would be inviting 100,000 people to test drive the new Wave platform. When I found out about this exciting new technology about three months ago, I instantly signed up to try it out. This video will probably help explain why.

If you have a Wave account and an extra invite, I would be really, really, really, really, really, really, really thankful if you would think to send it to me. dhaddock at storycorps.org. I have been pining for this to come out for several months, and although I don’t like that video very much, it’s clear to me that this is going to be a very powerful platform for communication. Here are the two main reasons I think so. Maybe this will make you want to invite me:

Communication: Right now the two best mediums for collaborating on a project in real time are in person, on the phone, email and chat. In-person communication is my favorite, because despite my IT profession, I’m really a people-person. A personable person. A purple people eater. On the phone is a nice substitute, but it’s always awkward when people end up pausing or talking over each other. Email is really good because it can be direct, and there is time to think before responding. Chat’s probably the most difficult because it’s the closest thing to a phone conversation, but minus the inflections of voice, not in the very least confusing during moments of sarcasm, right?

Google Wave seems to have many features that are focused on sharing information amongst fellow Wavers. For instance, there are already extensions available for SalesForce, Google Maps, Lonely Planet, and more. (See this page.) Sure, we can use Wave for a friendly chat or playing a game together, but these extensions refocus the medium on sharing information. Wave seems to combine the best aspects of email and chat, allowing me to pass links and otherwise share things with collaborators, supplementing message with actual data. No more pasting 250 character urls in a chat window, maybe? No longer wondering if the url I pasted in that email will work.

Collaboration: As IT manager, it’s highly inefficient for me to meet with my team. We do meet, of course, for weekly check-ins, but outside of that I’m planning for the next steps, filling in gaps, and meeting with other departments and our directors to orient our technological infrastructure with our goals and budget. It’s wizard’s work, to be honest. I love it. Basically we communicate like this: if we don’t need a fast response–email. If we do need a fast response, we either chat or get up and walk to someone’s desk.

But how awesome would it be to have my entire team on the same chat-like platform, sharing links and picking up and putting down the conversation as we work in the background? Say I’m working with an intern to develop a PHP script for our SugarCRM site. We could be chatting about the script while at the same time collaborating on the code. Now that can be extremely powerful. Wave is another feather in the cap of distributed programming, and also any other type of distributed project that requires multiple inputs. How cool would it be to work in real time with our development department contributing to tech grant language as they write the meat of the text?

So, if you have a Google Wave invite available, I’d absolutely love you for sharing it with me. I realize the platform will be available to the public soon, but I want to get my hands on it now to see if it can really do everything I think it can. I’m also familiar with several of the Google APIs, and I’d like to explore the extensions.

Thanks! I promise I won’t break it!

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