I’m interested in exploring the Google Wave communication system, if anyone wants to try it I’m [email protected].

Should I not publish that address on a website? Is there Wave spam yet? If not, I’m predicting it. You heard it here first, folks.

I’m also nervous about Google owning yet another slice of our collective information infrastructure. In the case of Wave, the code is (or will be) open-sourced, and in theory anyone could make independent server software to host waves. But unike conventional email you can’t use an off-line email application as a principle place to host and store the things you’ve written to each other, so our communications are pushed yet further onto the cloud. If my wave service could be hosted on my own cloud server that inter-operated with other people’s self-hosted wave servers that wouldn’t bother me much. But I still haven’t seen movement towards personal cloud computing. And even if someone did make that happen, most people would go with a Wave service hosted and operated by a big company anyway, so that they wouldn’t have to think about it too much. And most of those people will end up with Google, because it will be the first Wave provider and, knowing Google, the best implemented.

Thus, if Waves do significantly supplant emails, the single most important messaging tool on the internet will largely be centralized with the same publically traded for-profit corporation that handles our mapping and our driving and our book searching and our public transiting and our finding of each other and our finding of everything. And it is indeed Google’s stated hope that wave will be the next email.

That said, who wants to try it out with me?

Update Dec 8th: I now have a whole bunch of invites to give out. The rate they’re arriving suggests that Wave is close to going open to normal sign-ups, but if you’re still looking for early access, and I know you somehow, I can probably hook you up.