Google Wave has finally turned on email notifications as a feature for users who want to see immediate, hourly, or daily email notifications for new and updated waves.
Email updates can be turned on via the Inbox dropdown menu. Once on, Google Wave will notify you with a summary of updates to your waves and email you when you’re added to a new wave. Thankfully you’ll only receive one update for each individual wave — instead of receiving an email for each update to a wave — until you log into that wave again.
As notifications are still in the testing phase you can definitely expect the experience to be somewhat buggy. Google warns that you could get notifications for updated waves even if you’re the one that made the update, you can’t turn off notifications via the email link, and information in the notification may not show all the participants in a wave.
Still, the option of email notifications is far better than no option at all. We have a sneaking suspicious that Google may have rushed the feature out to get inactive wavers absent in the past few months back into the wave experience. To that same purpose, Google recently released a smarter API in an effort to spur more developer interest in their preview product.