Google Prepares to Send Out 100,000 Google Wave Invites this Fall
Mountain View–based search engine giant Google has announced that as it plans to extend the Google Wave preview to the regular user – currently Wave is available to developers only. In this regard Google will send out a total of 100,000 Google Wave invites as of September 30th.
Product Manager with Google Wave, Dan Peterson, explained: “We plan to start extending the Google Wave preview beyond developers on September 30th. This will take place on wave.google.com rather than the separate "sandbox" instance we are currently using, and we plan to involve about 100,000 users. In addition to the developers already using Wave, we will invite groups of users from the hundreds of thousands who offered to help report bugs when they signed up on wave.google.com.”
Until Google starts sending out invites, the development team behind Google Wave will focus on making certain aspects of this new communication and collaboration tool: speed stability and usability. This of course includes the bugs and problems reported by developers so far; it also includes the expansion of Google Wave APIs so that 3rd party developed extensions “feel fully on-par with Wave’s native features” added Peterson.
If you are not familiar with Google Wave, here is a brief explanation. It is Google’s new online communication and collaboration tool that will be rolled out to the general public later this year. Or as Google put it when it announced Wave, it is “what email would look like if it were invented today.”
So far, we know that you can do the following with Google Wave:
- communicate with your friends and contacts just like you do with an IM client.
- communicate with your friends just like you do with an email client.
- collaborate online (edit rich media content at the same time).
- get rid of annoying typos. Google Wave includes a context-sensitive spell checker which works like this: as you type in your message, Wave uses language models from Google Translate to highlight any errors (like words that do not belong there).
- Google Wave APIs allow you to embed waves in web pages; they also allow you to add live social gadgets.
Product Manager with Google Wave, Dan Peterson, explained: “We plan to start extending the Google Wave preview beyond developers on September 30th. This will take place on wave.google.com rather than the separate "sandbox" instance we are currently using, and we plan to involve about 100,000 users. In addition to the developers already using Wave, we will invite groups of users from the hundreds of thousands who offered to help report bugs when they signed up on wave.google.com.”
Until Google starts sending out invites, the development team behind Google Wave will focus on making certain aspects of this new communication and collaboration tool: speed stability and usability. This of course includes the bugs and problems reported by developers so far; it also includes the expansion of Google Wave APIs so that 3rd party developed extensions “feel fully on-par with Wave’s native features” added Peterson.
If you are not familiar with Google Wave, here is a brief explanation. It is Google’s new online communication and collaboration tool that will be rolled out to the general public later this year. Or as Google put it when it announced Wave, it is “what email would look like if it were invented today.”
So far, we know that you can do the following with Google Wave:
- communicate with your friends and contacts just like you do with an IM client.
- communicate with your friends just like you do with an email client.
- collaborate online (edit rich media content at the same time).
- get rid of annoying typos. Google Wave includes a context-sensitive spell checker which works like this: as you type in your message, Wave uses language models from Google Translate to highlight any errors (like words that do not belong there).
- Google Wave APIs allow you to embed waves in web pages; they also allow you to add live social gadgets.
