Just to be clear: This is not a public launch. Wave is still not ready for that yet, apparently. Instead, Google has looked over the applications that were filed over the past four months to test out the service and is handing out invites to users who expressed interest early, and also made it clear that they were willing to test software that still contained bugs. Unfortunately, not everyone that expressed interest will get an invite today, but it seems that more will be coming on a regular basis, provided that everything goes well with this expanded test.

To start out they are sending out a maximum of 100,000 invites as a user test, which is focusing on three groups: The public users who signed up early to test, developers, and a select group of Google Apps users. The last group will be kept very small, and the team expects it will only go out to select schools in the Sydney area so that the team can do some hands-on work with students and faculty that use the product. The first two groups, the developers and the public, will make up the core audience of Wave now, after these past months of being available only to a select group of developers.

But the key to Wave is interaction, which the team knows. As such, they are also giving every user that gets an invite today, 8 other invites to hand out to friends. That should expand the test even further very rapidly. But no, those friends will not get invite codes to hand out as well.
I sat down and used Google Wave for the first time in weeks yesterday, and the ride is definitely smoother. While there are no shortage of new features that the team is dreaming up and is eager to begin work on, they have been solely focused on fixing bugs, making things faster, and improving the usability. According to Google, the Wave is will crash far less than Twitter. And we have all seen how Twitter has dealt some tough blow as of late. From the Iran election to the Russian Government sabotage to the MTV VMA awards, Twitter has seens its bandwidth explode as of late! Google assures it willbe more secure and capable of withstanding more traffic than Twitter.
Also undergoing a lot of changes has been the API. And that’s a big part of what else will be launching alongside these new invites: Featured Extensions.

While Wave is a product, the larger goal for the project is to make it into a communications platform. And that means they’re going to need third-party developers on board, working to build stuff on top of Wave. That work is already well underway, and Google plans to highlight several extensions that have already been built and are in working order. These include a Suduko game (that you play entirely inside Wave in real-time with your friends), a Ribbit conference call gadget, a weird and fun video chat gadget by 6rounds (we’ve covered them here), and a trip-planning gadget by Lonely Planet.

Each of these gadgets takes only two clicks on install, and you can begin using them socially within Wave. Bigger picture: There are also large companies working on their own Wave ideas for how to use the communications tool. These include companies like Salesforce.com, we’re told.
Google is also moving Wave out of its sequestered sandbox site and into the wave.google.com domain where it will permanently reside. Because of this, users who get invites will now also be able to sign up with their actual email addresses (previously, you had to create a new special Google Wave addresses). This will give you access to your Gmail contact list, which Wave will automatically scan to find other Wave users you may know.
Wave works okay in IE, but in IE with ChromeFrame, it’s extremely fast!

So when will we see a full launch of Wave? While the team declined to give a specific time-table, they did say that it will definitely be 2010, and alluded to the fact that it should be the first half of 2010. They also noted that one key next step will be to provide support for other languages. Right now, Wave is English-only, even though it has tools built in that translate its content to any other language.

So check your inboxes for those Wave invites starting tomorrow. And if you know of friends using it, hit them up for an invite as well.

Denny Jaconi
Senior Editor
WebGem Network