About a week ago, I got an invite to try out Google Wave.  Since then, I’ve messed around with it a bit.

It purports to be a replacement for email (among other things), but the one thing that really hinders the service from being anything other than a novelty at this point is the same thing that would bring it crashing down: ubiquity.

Google Wave invites aren’t easy to come by and the average person on the street, who might be well aware of Gmail, has probably not yet heard of Google Wave.  So, the hodgepodge of friends I have that are using the service aren’t using it regularly; why check an “email” account on a service used by less than 10% of your contacts and where you never get messages?

Sure, I can see its potential, but it’ll be hard to get a real bearing on the usefulness and practicality of Wave until a large amount of people I know are using on a daily basis.

For now, it’s just a technology without an active userbase, which makes it interesting and fun, but not terribly useful.