Surfing a lonely Wave

I finally got my Google Wave invite today - not from Google, sadly, but from an acquaintance on Twitter. Twitter has been awash with offers of Wave invites, which usually consist of a link and a requirement to re-tweet the offer, ensuring that searches for "wave invites" are spammed with the same rash of offers, all of which are fake offers designed to generate traffic, and hence ad revenue, for the spammer.

Anyway, Wave itself is rather boring at the moment. It's like the first fax machine: on its own, it's completely useless. Add another fax machine, and the value and utility of the first one doubles. As you add more fax machines, each one becomes more useful and valuable. This is known as the network effect, and is one of the guiding principles behind most Internet ventures.

So my lonely Wave account, connected to two people I know on Twitter (but don't communicate with regularly) is pretty useless. I can't communicate with - or "ping" - any of my regular contacts, as they don't yet have invites. I'm wondering why Google hasn't made Wave backwards-compatible with email to start with, so that I can at least email people I know and see our emails in Wave. This is how GMail is meant to work, with threaded "conversations" grouped by subject line. Google's definitely missed a trick here.

In the next few days - hopefully - I'll get some invites of my own, and plan to invite my regular correspondents, and maybe then I'll be able to see what Wave can really do. At the moment, though, it's like a lonely fax machine.