You can now get Google Wave without an invitation, Google announced today. If you've got a Google sign-in (such as the one you use for GMail) you'll be able to roll right into (and through) Wave's login page.
So what is Wave? Well, I don't really know since I just signed up. But it turns out that people were asking similar questions last year when the product was first rolled out:
[Google's introduction of Wave] failed to answer perhaps the fundamental question, “what do we do with it right now?,” developer Lars Rasmussen tells us. ”That’s because we weren’t sure,” he admits. People would load it up and get overwhelmed or confused. “But we know that now — it’s about groups of people adopting Wave,” he says.OK, so there is a bunch of information out there from Google and others describing what Wave is and how it works. I liked this video as an introduction.
Over the past year of watching usage, Rasmussen’s team concluded that the “sweet spot” for Wave is group collaboration. While these days, most sexy new services are some variety of social network where people share things, Wave is about “people getting together to get work done,” he says. And that’s the market Wave now intends to go squarely after. (via TechCrunch)
Update: You may also want to check out this article in Lifehacker, linked to in previous post about Google Wave by Sara Loree.
