The Wave team introduced a new feature, allowing to “follow” public waves – seems like a twitterification of Wave.

From the blog post:

We’ve received lots of feedback from Wavers that the public waves they read were clogging up their inboxes. Today, we’ve introduced a new concept to Google Wave–”following” waves. Now, clicking on a public wave no longer causes it to appear (and stay) in your inbox; you have to explicitly choose to “follow” the wave.

Here’s how following works: When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. When you see a public wave that you would like to get updates on, you can chose to follow it by hitting the follow button in the wave panel toolbar. You can remove these waves from your inbox by hitting the “archive” button, but when there is an update they will pop back in. You can switch between following and unfollowing a wave as much and as often as you like.

Public waves that are in your inbox simply because you opened them at some point in the past will start to leave your inbox as they get updated. You can also manually remove them with the “archive” feature, and they will no longer return. We hope this will help with clearing a backlog of unwanted waves.