It took exactly three days from the initial invite to the actual account creation. Last Sunday, a kind soul by the name of Azam was kind enough to give me one of his last remaining invites (he’s the webmaster of SquidUp – visit it if you’re a fellow Squidoo’er!). The initial response from Google Wave:

Invite others to Google Wave

Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times. Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

So, I finally got my official Google Wave invitation instructions, and scurried to log in and check it out (see my screenshots below). Overall, it’s very barren. You’re going to need to add more people to get Google Wave going – that’s a fact.

It its current state, there’s not much you can do with Google Wave. As you can see in my screenshots, I typed out a message in the right-hand pane, which appeared as my first “wave.” If you “ping” one of your friends, it opens what appears to be a chat box.

There’s no doubt about it, I have no clue as to what I’m doing, or what this all means. This would assuredly make sense if I had two others actively using it while I was, so that I could see the collaboration that goes on. Regardless, it appears to be a big version of Google Chat, but we all know there’s plenty more coming.

I’ll be sure to write an update as more gets added to my Google Wave dashboard!

Google Wave has long been heralded a turning point in how we use browsers. It’s a browser-based service that mashes up chat, email, bookmarking, social networking and a ton of other great stuff into one multi-framed window. It could even be a blessing for web marketers. Just imagine web users collaborating with all of that cool stuff, live, on one platform!