How to give Google Wave invitations

Notice: Please do not ask me for a Google Wave invitation. I am not giving away any more.

I see a lot of people have been visiting my blog because of my recent offer of Google Wave invitations, and judging by the search terms, some are confused as to how to give out invitations. I always try to be helpful, so here’s a quick tutorial.

To give out invitations, you must have gotten some from Google. I don’t think everybody got them. If you were invited by Google to be a beta tester, you did. If you were invited by someone else, you probably didn’t. Google will be sending out more invitations as soon as their servers can handle the additional capacity, by the way, so keep checking.

Open up Google Wave. In your Inbox you should see a Wave sent just to you with the subject “Invite others to Google Wave.” Click on it to open it. At the bottom of the Wave, you’ll see the number of invitations you have and a box to enter the email addresses of folks you’d like to invite. Once you enter an email address, scroll down in the Wave a bit (use that teeny scroll bar on the right side of the Wave), and click the “Add to invite list” button to nominate them.

This is important — I don’t think the nominations are automatic. Google wants to control the flow of people coming onto the service, which may explain the delay in someone receiving your invitation. Have patience. I’m fairly positive everyone I nominated eventually got their invitation.

And that’s it. I haven’t actually been using Google Wave, sad to say. Anybody else doing something cool with it?