Google has said that it will send out more than 100,000 invites to developers who have been active in the developer preview the company started up back in June. Selected Google Apps customers will also receive invites and users who signed up and offered to provide feedback wave.google.com will receive invites for friends and family.
Announced last May, Google Wave is a sort of a huge, social-networking message board that combines an Internet browser, instant messaging, wikis, photo sharing, and e-mail:
“You create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly,” explains Wave developer Lars Rasmussen. “It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication,” he continued. “You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”
In this morning's blog post, Rasmussen did say there were still some key features missing from Wave that the company has yet to implement. At the moment you can't remove a friend from a wave, define groups of users or configure the permissions of users on wave. Rasmussen said that they'd be rolling out those features, along with a draft mode and more, over the next few months.
How many of you use Google Wave? Let us know what you think of the service below.
