It seems like everywhere I turn, there is someone looking for a Google Wave Invite. On the other hand, I now have Wave accounts on so many different machines, it is hard to keep track of them. How is this so? Simple, I’m testing lots of different new features for Waves.

With that, let me talk about where you can set up a Wave account. First, there is my own machine, Orient Lodge. You need to have ssh access on your machine to access it. If you use Windows, you can download Cygwin or Putty and get ssh access that way. If you use Mac or Linux, you should be able to go to a terminal window and enter the ssh command. If you want an account on my machine, send me a message and I’ll give you an account and details on how to use it. It is worth noting that it is a text based client that is in test mode, primarily for testing federation. Waves and blips may disappear when I perform updates, which is fairly frequent, and the interface, well, let’s just say it needs a lot of work.

A few other people have connected to my Wave server, mostly to test federation as well as to consider how federation might work with other systems like Second Life, Opensim, or statusnet.

Another site that I really like is Danopia’s Ruby on Sails. This is a Ruby on Rails implementation of a Google Wave client. It seems to be down more than it is up. However, it is a nice client, and Ruby on Rails seems to be a great platform. They are busy trying to get federation up and running. When that happens, my server will federate with Ruby on Sails. I may also try to add the Ruby on Sails client on my machine at some point.

The other site that anyone can use that looks really promising is PyGowave. This is a Python client for Google Wave. Like Ruby on Sails, anyone can connect and create waves. Unlike Ruby on Sails, this server seems to remain up constantly. However, it does not appear to do anything with federation, and from what I’ve read so far, federation does not seem to be supported and adding federation support may be a challenge. So, you won’t be able to connect to it from my server of Danopia’s server.

Wave seems to be changing very rapidly as we speak, so this information could well be out of date before you know it. Are you experimenting with Wave? How’s it going? Got any fun clients? Want to federate? Let me know.