Google Wave opened to public – are you using it?

After an year of development, Google has opened Wave for public access. Now you don’t need to wait for an invitation to get a Wave account. Go to wave.google.com, sign up, fill in the blanks and you’re on Wave!

When  the Wave was announced, it was mainly considered as a move from Google to overshadow Microsoft’s announcement of Bing search engine. Many developers thought that the announcement of Wave was too early as the tool was not at all ready for the big time. But Google had opened Wave as developer preview and gave access to it through invitations. Google asked developers to contribute to Wave in the form of Wave bots and APIs.

Now the Wave is open to public. After my initial impressions, I could see noticeable improvement in the current version of Wave. The speed has improved, there are several new Wave types (discussion, task tracking, meeting, etc) and an extension gallery is being introduced. Importantly now it is easy to read updated wave messages just by clicking next on each Wave. So, with out a doubt, Wave team has done a good job in bringing in this new collaborative tool to the main stream.

But the success of Wave, surely depends on the way people use it. For me, I haven’t figured out any use cases yet.  I’m content with Gmail itself for my communication.

But I want to know how you guys are using Wave for collaboration. I have created a Wave to discuss this. My wave ID is: talktoveera@googlewave.com. If you’re in Wave, leave your Wave ID in the comment box (or wave your ID to me). I’ll add you to the discussion Wave and we can try learning Wave by actually *using it*.