I was lucky enough to receive a Google Wave invitation in the second round of invites google sent out.
After the initial excitement of being one of the lucky invitees wore off I lent a more critical eye to what Google’s touted as an Email replacement.
So far to me it’s looking a lot like a combination of Instant Messenger, MySpace, IRC and WhiteBoard. I’m not seeing the Email replacement so far for one reason and one reason only. There’s no way to add someone to a wave without adding them to your contact list (At least that I’ve found so far in my incessant searching).
To me this is a deal breaker for an Email replacement, especially if you send a lot of messages to people once and then never need to contact them again. I can see the contact list getting WAY out of control. Hopefully this will be changed in the final release.
Other than that I can see Wave being incredibly useful for anything that requires a lot of back and forth or collaboration.
Wave Screen Shot
The big news the past couple weeks has been the announcement that Google is working on a lightweight OS named “Chrome OS” which Google hopes to have widely adopted for NetBook use. Google wants to do to the OS what they did to the browser with Chrome. In their words go back to basics they want the OS to be speedy simple and secure. The idea is that users won’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. Sounds good right? 
