There are now many hundreds of thousands of active Google Wave users, showing that Google has been busy scaling since their release of 100,000 invites one month ago. There were about two million invite requests in the queue at the launch of the public preview.

The Google Wave team is aware of the existing problems, especially as they use Wave as their primary collaboration tool. For example, the “lonely waver” problem, where a new user will have no contacts. Also, users seem to be happy with the design of Google’s Wave interface, but speed and stability are known to be poor.

Unexpected uses of Wave have also emerged, such as the use of public waves for back-channel chat during TV shows (even though public waves only represent 5% of all activity). You can find public waves by searching for ‘with:public’, a feature that was not originally intended for the preview.

The Wave team also addressed their lack of involvement in the development of a client/server protocol, citing other priorities and limit resources. Although I understand that the focus is currently on the server/server federation protocol, I am concerned that the lack of client/server guidance will hamper progress.

I was also concerned by the lack of any clear distinction between features specific to Google Wave, and features that will be interoperable between future clients. For example, I am not convinced that the wave team have carefully considered the implications of deploying robots and gadgets to third party wave clients. I would hate to see Google Wave to become the Microsoft Exchange of the wave protocol.

Update: I have uploaded the event photos to Flickr.

So, watch this space, the first post will be appearing shortly…