Waiting to catch the Wave

Today is the day that the first batch of live Google Wave invites is going to be released. According to the Google Blog you have the following options for grabbing an invite today:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

There is also indications that people who are in the developer preview can nominate people to move to the front of the queue for today's invites and that those who receive invites today will have to option to nominate others to receive invites in th near future.  It also looks like there will be a a few more than the 100,000 invites that Google has stated will be sent out.  More is good.

I think I was pretty quick to get signed up back when Wave was first announced, but only time will tell if I get an invite today.  It appears that the Wave invites will start to roll out in about 4 - 6 hours (about 5:00 pm CST in the US - just a guess).  According to @twephanie on Twitter, on of the Wave developers, they are going to wait until morning in Sydney for support issues.

Invites will go out late in the day US time on Sept 30 - we are in Sydney and want to be awake to support you all!

While we all sit back and wait for the invites to start rolling out, there are a few good sources of information that you can check out.  I suggest both Gina's article as well as the video for people who are not 100% familiar with what Wave is all about.  I will update this article later when invites start to appear, and will be sure to announce if an invite appears in my inbox.

Google Wave First Look by Gina Trapani on Lifehacker
Google Wave Overview Video a short video covering the main topics of interest in Wave.
My collection of Wave links, which I plan to grow after the invites are released.

Update #1 I am reading now that the invites will be sent at about 10 am Sydney time.  That would be about 7:00 pm here in Houston (CDT).  I am also reading that this roll-out will include 5 Gmail style invites so that those who receive an invite will be able to invite 5 friends.  That would make the initial pool of users much, much higher than we heard initially.  I guess I will believe that one when we see it.

Update #2 8:00 PM CDT @twephanie just posted the following to Twitter. "Wave invites starting ... will take many many many many hours to get them all out! We are so very grateful for all the interest!!"

Update #3 7:27 AM CDT No Wave invite in my inbox this morning.  Hopefully I can snag one over the next several weeks.

Diigo 4.0 Release

I have been a nut for social bookmarking tools for quite some time.  It started a long time back with Delicious and then moved to Ma.gnolia and recently has been on Diigo.  The Diigo tool offers the additional feature of annotation, which really sets it apart from other services.  Regardless, I have been storing my bookmarks online for a long time now, and I have used many services over the years.

For the past five or so months I have been working with the new Diigo 4.0 release in it’s alpha stage, and the work that the Diigo team has done on this new version is now publically available at http://www.diigo.com/.  I wanted to record some videos to show off some of the new features and give people a glimpse of some of what is new in this release.  I recorded 6 videos, each about 4-5 minutes long, covering some of the different aspects of this new release.  I used Jing to capture the videos and Windows Movie Maker to do some minor edits.  The audio was recorded through my Blue Snowball which I love.  Hopefully the audio quality is good (I know I talk way too fast at times).

I will let the videos tell most of the story, but I wanted to make a couple general comments on this new Diigo release.

1. The UI for Diigo is much cleaner now.  I feel that it is easier to find things, especially for new people to Diigo.  Experienced users may find it difficult to find things initially, but I am sure that will pass.
2. Diigo has made huge strides in terms of search speed and accuracy.  This is perhaps the most noticeable thing after the UI changes.

Without further delay, lets get on with the videos.  You can also check out some Diigo recorded videos on Vimeo.

Google Sites Liberation

Finally!!! A way to back up Google Sites content. Thanks to the new Google Sites API (http://code.google.com/apis/sites/), this tool has been created to backup Google Sites data. This is long over due. The one thing that has kept me from really pouring a lot of effort into sites has been the inability to make a backup, now I don't have any excuses.

in reference to: google-sites-liberation - Project Hosting on Google Code (view on Google Sidewiki)