We’ve got our Google Wave invites and while we figure out what it actually does and wait for what comes next, all we really have is another method to communicate with each other, that we actually have to login to and check. Unlike email, twitter and facebook which we are being prompted about regularly and are in the habit of checking, whole conversations could be going on in wave that we won’t realise until we decide to give it another go next month and see what the fuss is all about. But now thanks to the Prowl iPhone app, we can have push notifications coming from the desktop wave client wrapper, Waveboard

Here’s the steps you’ll need to get started.

• First off it’s really handy if you have a spare computer which you leave running, so you get notifications when you’re out.
• You’ll need Growl for this to work
• Prowl for iPhone and the Prowl plugin
• In the Growl system prefs make sure that the default notification is set to Prowl
• Visit http://www.getwaveboard.com and download the installer and let it do it’s thing (Mac Only)
• Install and run Waveboard. At the moment it’s a wrapper for the website but with a few nice features added; hotkeys, status bar icon etc

What should happen is when you get a new wave, or an existing wave is updated, Waveboard will send the notification to Growl which in turn will Push out the Prowl app on your trusty iPhone and look like this:

Waveboard also offer an iPhone app which can be launched from the Prowl notification, it’s £0.59 and is’nt much more than a wrapper, although I’m sure it will improve over time, but I decided to stick with Google’s webapp version. Just browse over to http://wave.google.com, accept the warning that your browser isn’t supported and you should see webapp version of Wave. At this point you can add it as a bookmark to the homescreen, giving you a nice Wave icon and remove those browser controls. It’s flakey but it quite useable.

I’m not sure what will come from Wave, it could be the next Gmail, or the next Orkut, either way it’ll be an interesting journey.