Today I feel very special. I mean, receiving an invite for wave from Google themselves along with only 100,000 users. I even have the ability to invite 8 people, which most people apparently don’t have. My office-mates think I’m crazy to feel so special.

I personally found Wave to be a fusion of retro ICQ and GMail (if you didn’t use ICQ before ’99 you probably have no idea what I mean). That is… live-time editing, conversing, planning, and collaborating.

I can see it making my life so cool in a year or so when there are more people using it, and when there are more features. At this point though, with around 8 people on my contact list (and you can’t do anything with your GMail emails or any other service, it is completely stand-alone), I’m currently just having fun playing.

So what is Google wave, and what makes it so cool?

Collaborative Working:
If you have a job similar to mine, you’ll probably understand the hassle of sending documents back and forth for editing. You end up with a million drafts, and if you’re as messy as I am, you’ll have a very hard time keeping track of what is actually the draft you want.

Google Wave solves that problem, if it ever becomes associated with corporate tasks in the way that BaseCamp is.

This is me editing the Sandmonkey:

Editing collaboratively is even more functional than simply different versions, because you have a history kind of access to every single edit you made. In the example below, you can see the time line (with play, previous, fastforward) and you can browse through the 67 different instances of me editing my map.

The Event-Planner’s Heaven:
If you, like me, seem to constantly be getting stuck with the planning part, you will appreciate what Google Wave does to the hassle of planning.

Get this: you add all the people you want to do something with to a wave, and then you give a map that you stick in live from Google Wave, complete with directions and all. Then you add this gadget that has people decide who can make it and who cannot. People can actually discuss this event live on the Wave itself, rather than suffer with a million emails, messages, and chats all over the place. Social living at it’s best.

Gadgets, Awesome Gadgets:
I find that one of the most groundbreaking ideas in the past decade is the  idea of regular people developing applications, gadgets, extensions, and widgets for services. Naturally, Google Wave makes fantastic use of that. So far, there aren’t many extensions available, but I can imagine that in a few years, the extension landscape for Wave will change the way we work and live online. 

The extensions currently available include Accuweather (to make planning even easier), conferencing, soduku, Lonely Planet, video chat, among many others.

For a list, check out this document.

Not-so-groundbreaking Features:
There are also several features that improve usability although they are not exactly ground-breaking. For example, adding links ANYWHERE, using Google search in its full glory from your Wave, instant messaging, ability play through attachments in a light-box sort of way.

Transparency:
Yes, it’s buggy. Yes, it’s slow. Yes, there are so many un-implemented features. And that makes it even cooler. I love how not everything is perfect yet, I love how human it is.
Live progress makes you appreciate a service better, which is perhaps why I love my Gmail so much. I also got my Gmail account in its invite-only phase, and watching it grow and mature has made me much closer to it.
Okay,  that’s really geeky to say, but today I discovered that I am even geekier than I thought I am.
You know. It’s simply unimplemented. It’s not there yet. It’s preview. Not even alpha!

My Google Wave Wishlist:
1. GMail integration. I want my GMail inbox to be inside Wave, I want to be able to do things to my emails.
2. Ability to interact with non-Wavers, email them at least.
3. A file-sharing platform, sort of like Drop Box. I want to add my files to a vault on wave, where people can edit them when they’re in my vault, including files like .AI .PDF and .DOC.
4. Syncing it with my phone.

I don’t want to be having all the fun alone, and I have three Google Wave invites to give away. The first three commentators 
who think they would really enjoy Google Wave as much as I do (and without the Google is evil and I don’t see what’s so cool about Wave stuff) will get the invites.