Geek Testing

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select business and university customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

1. They intend to quickly ramp up to 100,000 users, but quickly doesn't necessarily mean on Day 1.
2. They are aware of negative impressions that have already been aired, like Anil Dash's post on why he thinks Google Wave will not catch on. Google Wave is complicated. The average user won't get it yet.
3. It's really a Preview, not Beta like GMail when it first came out. GMail was fully functional. With Wave, even the requirements are still being worked out.
4. Google Wave is not an application or a service. Well not yet, anyway. Lars and his team are first trying to put a whole new type of infrastructure in place. They expect the user community to build the actual applications on top of it, given a few samples to show what's possible.
5. The reason for the preview is to figure out what the world wants to do with Wave. Look at the types of people they're inviting. Only Early Adopters. Not your average joe.
6. Security features aren't really that great on Google Wave yet. If it becomes easy for spammers to get on Google Wave, it could bring the whole thing down.
7. Invites aren't a "gift for someone you love". Invites are a necessity in Google Wave. They are the only way you can collaborate with people you already know. Collaboration with strangers is simply too chaotic. The public wave ecosystem in Google Waves is mostly a mess.
8. Given all this, they wouldn't want to use Invites the same way they did with GMail. They want to be very careful about who they actually hand out invites to. They want people who can take their vision, and shape Wave into something useful. And yet, they can't let these constraints get in the way of allowing people to create communities of people of their own choice, to collaborate with.

1. Invitations will not be sent immediately - They don't say how much of a delay there will be, though.
2. Lot of stamps to lick - This makes it sound like invites will either go through a special process (approval?) before being sent out, or that they might send invitations out in phases ramping up at a pace they are more comfortable with.
3. People you've nominated - The word "nominated" here must mean that you don't make the choice of who gets on Wave next, but that you only make a suggestion. I see two possibilities. Either they use nominations to create a priority list for sending out invites, or they have some kind of approval workflow before accepting a nomination.

Labels: Google Wave, Technology, Tools