I got invited to the Google Wave alpha the other day, and while it has almost everything it needs to supplant email, IM and facebook and everything else (aside from a critical mass of users, of course), it is lacking one thing at this early stage: a way to make my computer flash, ping, burp or otherwise inform me of new waves – pretty vital if it’s to replace IM or even push email.

Enter: Waveboard.

Waveboard is a site-specific-browser (SSB) that loads up wave.google.com/wave, so the experience is exactly the same as in your regular web broswer (sort of, more on that later). Once it’s loaded it can badge its dock icon, trigger a Growl event, or colourise its menu bar icon to let you know there are new waves or blips that might merit your attention.

It’s early days yet – Wave itself isn’t even ready for public consumption – so it’s quite excusable that Waveboard is missing some stuff I’d expect. The ability to make sounds is a key one, since pings, waves and new blips in a wave are all subtly different events and it would be nice to tell them apart audibly.

One nice feature is that it re-maps some of the keyboard shortcuts to more mac-like ones – to finish editing a blip in Waveboard you no longer type shift-return, but command-return, and bolding text is done with command-B. Smooth stuff.

I have reservations about SSBs – browsers are prone to running off with all your RAM if you leave one open long enough, and this is essentially a site-restricted browser that you would want to leave open all the time. That said, Wave seems to behave faster under Waveboard than in Safari 4, even animating transitions which just change immediately under S4. It uses less memory too, just about.

A surfeit of clients is going to be vital to Wave’s take-up, so it’s nice to see one available so soon. I can only hope that someone from the delicious generation will take up the challenge and make a truly mindblowing desktop client. And maybe an iPhone app that supports push, while they’re at it?