Adobe Wave is an all-purpose aggregator designed to let you keep up to date on a variety of different media streams.

The application is a simple AIR app that connects to a variety of different services and displays a small alert when new content is available. The sign up screen is simple, but requires an Adobe ID (free):

Once you're in, you can pick the channels you'd like to subscribe to.

When new content arrives, you'll be greeted with a small alert window:

You can view past alerts or manage your subscriptions from the app, which otherwise remains hidden from view:

Current Adobe Wave partners include myspace, digg, VentureBeat, lastminute.com, Variety, livestation and 1000 Mikes with support for other services like evite coming soon.

Additionally, content publishers can incorporate Adobe Wave into their products by creating a publisher account. Unfortunately this process seems to be only available to providers of corporate content - getting a publisher account requires a company, website, e-mail address with matching domain, and personal verification by an Adobe employee.

The service is similar to other channel / subscription based services like Twitter or Brightkite, but makes it easier to send more targeted information. Rather than receiving tweets from evite about...everything, I'd receive only information specific to my account (invitiations I needed to respond to.)

The value seems to be in helping users get simple notifications or status messages in a medium other than e-mail. To date, email subscriptions and notifications have dominated this type of content. Rather than making e-mail a one-size-fits-all solution for all messages to users, Wave could help e-mail return to it's original intent (mail - personal messages) and keep the notifications and status updates somewhere more manageable.

It seems to me like the success or failure around Adobe Wave is going to be directly tied to the number of publishers they can get using this channel. Having to wait for an Adobe representative to review your information and activate your account is a small but painful barrier to entry for a nascent messaging service. It's also confusing that normal users can't get in on the action - Adobe's Ted Patrick integrated Wave with his blog, but I can't find any clear instructions on how I could do the same without getting full corporate account. Maybe I'm just missing it though - I'll update this post if I can figure it out. :)

UPDATE: Private users can indeed sign up - just list your blog or website or whatever as your "company name." Adobe responded to my application within a few hours yesterday, so it looks the small barrier to entry I referenced yesterday is indeed small.

For more information, check out the offiical Adobe Wave page, or click here for the Developer Documentation with more details on how the service works.

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