ReadWriteWeb

Yesterday we looked at how Google Wave (a new product that is part email, part IM, part something entirely new) is being used as an educational tool. In this post we explore if and how Wave is being used by the artistic community. This topic was suggested by Cory Huff, a commenter on the first post, who noted: "I've been looking for artists to Wave with, as I think artistic collaboration has some possibilities."

We discovered that there is excitement about the potential for artistic collaboration using Wave. However the level of actual collaboration activity is still very low. Here's what we found...

Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September.

Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? Let's start with the education sector. We'll explore other use cases in upcoming posts.

The beta launch of Google Wave has once again put the spotlight on the shortcomings of email. Wave tries to be everything for everybody, but others, like the recently launched Nurphy, have opted for a more focused approach. Nurphy, founded by Paul Horsfall and Neil Cauldwell, wants to be a replacement for email conversations with multiple recipients. The result is an interesting mix between email, Twitter, Yammer and IM that is aimed at both business and casual users.

Disclosure: I didn't get an early invitation, so this is not a first-hand review of Google Wave. But from what I know now, I don't want an invitation anymore. It looks like too much of a productivity suck. But I do use Google Spreadsheet all the time. It is the de facto real-time, online, distributed collaboration tool for serious GTD business. It is the best tool for an agile, networked business.

But it could be way, way better. Excel is still the best spreadsheet; it has just fallen behind on collaboration (and collaboration is a show-stopper). But Microsoft could catch up there, and a lot of really sharp startups are gunning for the same space.

Google will unleash 100,000 invites to use Google Wave later today. While Wave itself is obviously an exciting product, Google is also trying to create a developer ecosystem around Wave and has selected six Wave extensions to feature as good examples of what developers will be able to do with Wave: a competitive Sudoku game from LabPixies, a teleconferencing extension from Ribbit, video chat from 6rounds, travel planning from Lonely Planet, a weather widget from AccuWeather, and a map widget courtesy of Google Maps.

Google just officially announced that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave tomorrow. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-served basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.

Google just announced that it will open up Google Wave to a large number of Google Apps users this fall. According to the announcement, Google will first open up access for some schools and businesses and plans to bring Wave to all Google Apps users next year. Google Apps administrators can now sign up for Google Wave accounts here. Google had already announced that it would hand out about 100,000 Wave accounts on September 30th and this looks to be the first step towards this.