[Leaplist] Any Google Wave invites left?

[John Simpson]

On 2009-12-02, at 1234, Steve Litt wrote:
> 
> I haven't jumped on this bandwagon either. I find it offensive that I have to 
> be invited in. If I were that kinda guy, I'd stand outside Studio 54 trying to 
> get the bouncers to let me in.

remember that google wave is a "product under development", they're not really ready to have the entire world start playing with it. (my mother, for example, wouldn't know what to make of it. to her it would just be an email system which works differently, and which doesn't exchange email with the rest of the world.)

as for using the invite system... they need to slowly ramp up usage to match the capacity and usability of the system, while allowing themselves time to find and fix bugs, and by ensuring that the bugs which are reported, are reported pretty much in the order in which they would want to work on them.

i have a friend who was in the audience at the initial unveiling. he got his invite that afternoon, so he was "first generation". figure there were about 3,000 people in the audience, so at that point 3,000 people were using it- all people who attended a google developer conference. as google "fanboys" they tended to be very understanding about the down-time and bugs associated with its pre-release status, and as developers they knew how to send in useful bug reports. from what my friend told me, during this time the system was often down for hours at a time while they found and fixed problems.

a month later he invited me, and it took five days for google to actually send me the link, so i was "second generation". he was given five invites to hand out, so figure each first generation got the same- which means at the end of the second generation there were about 18,000 people using it. these people are almost all going to be "techies" of one flavour or another, even if they may not be software developers or screaming google fanboys.

since i started using it, i've only seen the whole thing down twice, but not for longer than about 10 minutes each time. and a few times i've seen specific parts of it not working for an hour or two. and many of the changes i've seen over time have been cosmetic or usability improvements. this tells me they've found and fixed most of the bugs in the architecture, and that the things they're fixing now are minor.

the invites being sent now are third generation. some people are only getting 8, but some (like me) got 16. that's 288,000 potential new members, plus the 18,000 which already existed, which means there will be as many as 306,000 users when this generation is done. they probably expect to start getting users who are fairly intelligent, but not necessarily computer geeks.

so as time goes on, they're adding more users, but they're also adding specific TYPES of users at different times. and by varying the types of users, they're varying the types of bug reports which show up. i would imagine that, in general, they're seeing bug reports (and therefore concentrating their efforts) on bugs in order of real severity- first the core architectural issues, then interface bugs, and now usability and cosmetic issues.

personally, the more i think about it, the more i think it's a brilliant strategy. this is the same thing they did for gmail when it started... and once they got the bugs worked out (again, from the core to the cosmetics) they opened it up to almost everybody in the world, and the entire process went very smoothly, especially when you think about the number of mailboxes they must be hosting now.

for anybody who already has a wave account, my wave userid is my call sign, "kg4zow". to add me to your contact list within google wave, click the "+" button at the bottom of the contact list, and enter my userid followed by "@googlewave.com" (which, for now, is how you pretty much have to enter them. once federation is working i plan to set up my own google wave server, and my "official" address within the wave-sphere will be the same as my normal email address.)

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| John M. Simpson    ---   KG4ZOW   ---    Programmer At Large |
| http://www.jms1.net/                         <jms1 at jms1.net> |
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