Google Wave :: First Impressions

As someone who's been eagerly anticipating the initial public rollout of Google Wave, I waited with much anxiety and baited breath as the distribution of invites were pushed later and later into the evening of 9/30. I went to bed still hopeful, and awoke early to see my invite on 10/1.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a great deal of time to work in Wave yesterday, but I started to get some interesting things done with the platform this morning. I've embedded a screencast below which details some of the basics and some first impressions of the service.

Rule #1 of Wave: find people to wave with. No contacts on Wave is probably akin to being the first person with a Compuserve email address.

:: Update ::

Things are really moving fast in Wave, now that the contact list is growing. I've added a brief screencast to provide some insights into realtime public collaboration within Wave: