Google has announced that Google Wave, it’s new real-time online communication and collaboration tool for friends, will go live at the end of September. Google Wave, which allows friends to chat and share documents, links and maps in real time, will go live in September on an invite-only beta basis Initially, the service will only be available to around 100,000 people, who must sign up for the chance to be granted early access. Google is expected to roll out Google Wave to the general web public a month or so later. So far, only around 25,000 developers building applications and tools for Google Wave have been able to access the service. Related Articles Google Wave: how to be one of the first to try the new service Yahoo! redesign: a step in the right direction Google mark moon landing anniversary Yahoo! revamps home page with Twitter and Facebook integration Google cleared of defamation in landmark ruling Google launches Moon in Google Earth Google believes Wave represents the “next step†in online communication, combining real-time chat and email in to a single web browser window. Groups of friends will be able to set up a Wave, and swap photos, maps, videos, documents and other information “live†over the internet in real time. Even instant-messaging style chats between friends will be in real time, with the Google Wave screen showing what a person is typing as they type it. Users will even be able to pull in feeds from sites such as Flickr and Twitter, and show those within their Wave. Google said that in the run-up to the first wave of invitations to try out the new service, it will focus on improving the speed, stability and usability of Wave. Developers are busy creating plug-ins and widgets for Wave which will extend the functionality of the service. One such project, dubbed Waves in WordPress, will enable web users with a WordPress blog to embed entire Wave conversations in a blog post, allowing readers to view and interact with the conversation.
I signed up for a Google Wave invite a few days ago. I know my work is already beta testing Microsoft's version of this competing product and their product has lots of visual eye candy which I'm sure will take off for big businesses since it's more secure. But I do hope Google Wave makes some inroads.
This sounds like a really interesting concept. Any word of how invitations are handed out? Such as to Adwords users or Gmail users for example?
Any idea how they are going to share the invites? When gmail got launched, there was a speculation that bloggers got invites first.
If I get an invitation I might sign up, though I'm pretty sure they're difficult to come by and I doubt many of my friends would/will sign up anyway.
My friend got one. It is cool, but definitely early beta. I am going to ask for an invite. One of the scrollbars was too large for his notebook
Me tooo got one ! But that is to early than beta (preview) I am not getting into that coz i don have friend. Also the real time typing looks good. But when we react to that too quickly by replying, typing becomes slower or unsynchronized waves comes etc., inform to Dr. wave and the process goes on. Let google develope that cleanly, i will use later. Remember you cann't undo or retype the mispelled words or sentences in real time typing.