Viral marketing at its finest, teh googles does it again.

So I belong to a bunch of listservs as part of the ongoing communication aspect of my job as media architect. One of the listservs I have been on for years is “Calico-L” or the CALL (Computer Aided Language Learning) list. Wednesday after noon at the end of the day a message was sent out to the list:

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If there are any CALICO members who also have Google Wave accounts and would like to start one or more CALL waves, please send my your wave address and I will add you to my CALL wave.

Cheers,

Scott

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This has prompted an avalanche of messages from people looking to get invited to Google Wave. For those that don’t know, Google is seeding accounts to this service, by handing out invites to users with accounts, to send out to new people. The bulk of the messages look like this:

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Hello,
An invite to Google Wave would be appreciated:
name-excised@gmail.com
Thanks
Khalid
IUP-class’02

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…. me too
would u please send me an invitation to Google wave .

name-excised@gmail.com

thank you
Siham

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Hi,

Would you please send me an invitation,

Thanks in advance.

Brahim

EFL teacher, Morocco.

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My inbox looks like this:

wave

I have an account,  harlanwallach@googlewave.com, and frankly I have no idea what to do with this service, or why all these people want it. Never the less, it is something, apparently very much in demand. Google has really promoted and driven a web based promotional campaign for a new service, that is frankly, astounding. No real surprise there I guess.

If anyone want to share a wave with me, or whatever, feel free.