Okay, so this post should really be called: Google Wave, what use is a wave when you’re stranded on shore?

You see, here’s my story. I first found out about this thing called Google Wave (already called Gwave for short) by an internet marketer by the name of Howie Schwartz. This guy gives out a lot of great content and somehow managed to put together a product about Gwave before it is even released to the public – how’s that for getting the jump on the competition? Anyway, I watched a webinar on how Google Wave is the future and voted most likely to kill Facebook and I’m thinking – this thing looks pretty cool! Maybe I should try it out too!

So I do a search for Google Wave and find the page online, there’s nothing much there but you can request an invite so that you can start beta testing it for yourself. I did this and by the time I forgot all about it (approximately 2 weeks) I was suddenly welcomed into the Google Wave sandbox to test and try the sucker out. At this point in time I had two people (presumably testers like myself) and a representative from Google in my list of contacts.

And that was about it. Since Google Wave isn’t open to the public, you can’t just start using it with your friends – unless they’ve been invited to test already or you have some invites that you can give away yourself. As Google Wave preview reviews have pointed out, I almost started wondering if this was really some sort of social experiment, since I’d have to get friendly with these arbitrary contacts if I wanted to be able to give the ol’ Wave a go.

I ended up sending my first wave on November 30th, but neither of my contacts bothered to respond to me. I gave it a week or so and finally decided to send a Wave to the Google dude in my contacts, maybe he’d actually reply or something?

I told him that my contacts weren’t responding, what I got back from him was a whack of about 25 invitations that i could send out to people I know – now this is starting to get good right?

Not really. You see, I decided to be Mr. nice guy and invite some co-workers. I figured Google Wave would be a great way for my department to collaborate on stuff like departmental procedures or perhaps have a fully involved discussion over where to get our next pizza lunch from. Out of 6 others in my department, only one was interested in being sent an invite. I canvassed a few others at work and I got smiles and looks of interest, but once I sent out the invites NOBODY has yet hooked up with me on Gwave. Here is my lame screenshot showing how boring my Google Wave screen is at present.

For whatever reason, nobody I know wants to even touch Google Wave with a stick. I’m not sure why – I think most of them don’t even know what it is or what it does. It doesn’t look overly impressive I admit, basically like a vanilla version of Gmail – but the functionality built into it is pretty amazing. However I can’t speak of it from actual experience because I currently have zero!

So if you want to take pity on me and are actually interested in testing out G Wave for yourself, drop me a comment and you could end up with one of the dozen or so invites that I have left.

Last I heard, Google Wave was supposed to go live before 2010 – well, here we are and as far as I know it’s still off limits to the general public. If you ever wanted to be ahead of the bandwagon for a change – now’s your chance. Leave a comment below with your email and I’ll hook you up!

I’ll post again on Google Wave once I’ve actually had a chance to experience it.