Last week I had the fortunate occurence of a friend of mine being one of the 100,000 first users of Google’s new Wave. Being the lovely person he is, he duly sent out his invites to people on Thursday, and I was one of them. Hitting F5 on my inbox continuously for 5 minutes to welcome the invite home got kind of boring, so I went off and had lunch.
After lunch, still no invite.
Next day, still no invite.
Thankfully at this point others who had been recipients of the invites also mentioned theirs hadn’t come through either, so at least I knew I hadn’t been over looked (heh) in the invite sending process.
After some digging online, I have found very little in the way of fact, but it seems that the invites aren’t actually invites – they’re nominations for people to potentially come in and use the service. And no one knows how long you have to wait to hear from Google at all. The best blog post I found was Why You Haven’t Got Your Google Wave Invite Yet where some Google employees comment and confirm that they should probably maybe come out sometime in the future.
I need me some clippers this is all waaaay too wooly!
Seems strange to me not to have some sort of auto mailer saying, "Hey, gratz! DING DING! You got an invite, and as soon as we’ve got chance you’ll be in, expect to hear from us in the next 2 weeks!" or you know, perhaps something a leetle more professional. But you get my point.
As it stands, to me, it just causes confusion – was I actually invited? Has Google messed up on spam filters? Is the invite system broken?
A little clarity would go a long way. Just gets frustrating and obnoxious otherwise.
Got to say, not overly impressed this end, and I haven’t even seen what Wave can do for me yet. Why start us out on such bad feeling Google? Is it really that hard to just politely let us know our nomination has been received, and an approximation of when we might expect to get a look? As it stands, I’ll be wary of sending my invites out for fear of people thinking I’m bullshitting when I say they’ve been sent…
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