Google Sends Out 1 Million Wave Invitations

Google launched Wave to a wider audience a couple of months ago, though it mostly failed to live up to the hype. People were expecting the next-generation communications system, the email killer and got instead a rather complicated service which doesn't really know what it wants to be when it grows up. Nevertheless, demand has been high, people wanted to see for themselves if the hype was warranted or if the negative reviews were accurate, and Google is now saying, more or less, that it has sent out one million invites for the service which is still in private beta and closed to the public.

“[O]ur users' top feature request is "more invitations." We've been working to increase the capacity of our preview setup and have sent invitations to everyone who requested an invite through our online form. If you'd like to request an invitation, you can still sign up here,” Grim Iversen, product manager, Google Wave wrote. “We've also given existing users additional invitations to share with family, friends, and colleagues.”

Google did a survey a while back to see what it is that Wave users dig about the service and what they want to change. Unsurprisingly, most people just wanted more invitations to send out to their friends and family which Google has now provided. The number of invites each user gets has gone up from eight, when the service first opened up to a wider audience, to at least 28 in some cases.

The Wave team is also saying that all the people that requested an invite through the form it set up have been accepted into the preview. If you don't have an invitation or someone to send you one the signup form is still live and you can request one there. Of course, one million invites doesn't mean one million users and Wave still has a lot of work before living up to its hype and potential. For the moment, Google makes it clear that Wave is still an early preview, one with million people but a preview nonetheless, and it will be a while before it's ready for the prime time.