Rube Goldberg Software

I am among the privileged, so I'm told. I have a Google Wave account. No, I don't have invites yet so please don't leave me a comment or send me an email asking for one. EJ was my benefactor and no, he doesn't have any invites to share either. Here's what Google Wave is/does...

I've gone in and tried to play around a little. I can see some uses for group work, but it's still in preview and the clunk factor, at the moment, is outweighing the cool factor. That's my opinion for now. I'm sure that will change and we'll all glide in there and have a good time in the future.

But today was amusing. On LITA-L a proliferation of emails were sent with hopeful requests for invites. Invites are apparently being far more carefully guarded and reluctantly tokened out by Google than Gmail was--at least, in my memory*. When today, the requests started coming that people stop sending invite requests to the list (it was creating a lot of noise), something needed to be done.

Enter me with an editable spreadsheet. Have I mentioned how much of a fan of these I'm becoming? Shared Google Spreadsheets has made committee work so much easier and I can pass out book lists and all sorts of things--making them editable, view only, all sorts of convenient things. I named a spreadsheet, grabbed a link, and told people to add themselves.

At present we have 70 people on the list. That was in the first three hours. The hope is that when people are granted invites they will pull people from the list and bring them into the fold. And then that LITA people receiving invites will remove themselves or edit that they've already received an invite. Any way around it, at this point, I've gotten far less emails this afternoon.

A large (but controlled) group of people are using a shared spreadsheet to communicate with each other about gaining an opportunity to join a shared space to communicate with a large (but at this point controlled) group of people.

Email list to a shared spreadsheet to invites (via email) to join Wave.....

Rube Goldberg anyone?

*Is that the new uphill both ways in snow? I had to WAIT to get a gmail account?