Google announced in a blog post in its official blog that starting September 30, it would be sending out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave, the latest big project in Google's line-up.
The invitations were mostly sent to developers who were active in the developer preview last June, the first users to volunteer to give feedback over at the Google Wave website, and selected customers of Google Apps. Some of these invited people will be also asked to nominate people, including friends and family, who can also try out the new Google service.
In effect, Google Wave is now in private beta after Google developers concentrated on scalability and usability of the project. Quirks in the system are still all over, of course.
So what makes Google Wave the next big thing? Well, the Big G describes it as a "a personal communication and collaboration tool" that was designed to incorporate e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking into one web-based application. It was announced last May 2009 in the Google I/O conference.
It was designed to be the next generation of Internet communication where, instead of sending messages and their respective threads or having them stored in a participant's inbox, there are special objects called waves that contain multimedia messages stored in a central server. These waves are then shared to other collaborators, who can enter and exit the wave at real-time.
As I see it, it seems to be a lot like Google Docs, though Google Wave seems to be utilizing multimedia content more. it would be interesting to monitor how this will develop. In an age where Internet chatrooms are becoming more and more like actual conference rooms, it is interesting to learn more about these new tools that will help people collaborate with each other in real-time, wherever they are.
For more updates about the initial roll-up, you may check out this blog post from the Google Blog.
