“New Wave” no longer means Blondie and The Cars
My previous post is entirely null and void, because I have a Google Wave invite now (thanks to Marty Bonner).

Google Wave UI has a 'New Wave' button -- Gary Numan would be proud.
I have played with it for all of twenty minutes, so I don’t have any impressions of import to share yet, but:
- This is a bit buggier than other betas from Google I’ve played with during the invite phase, like Gmail. (Occasional crashes, buttons not working, things not archiving when I say archive.)
- It’s not really that hard to explain. It’s chat combined with e-mail in a post format, except each exchange can be edited by the participants and can be rich in media, and you see the other participants making their edits in real-time, typos and all.
- More than anything else, it reminds me of a bug system (such as Bugzilla).
I hereby boldly predict that — for groups collaborating on projects together — this will win. But for non-business uses, regular e-mail will remain more popular for, oh, the next ten years or so.
I’m estephen@googlewave.com. Wave me.