Google Begins Test Phase for Wave

As engineering manager Lars Rasmussen indicated in his blog, a huge number of invitations are going out to test the new service called Google Wave. With over 100,000 invitations, the search engine giant will contact developers and users who registered for a Wave test account.

As is customary with GMail, the earlier user group who signed up and offered feedback can nominate others for additional invitations. As Rasmussen says in his blog, "If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave." The test version should be stable enough and will implement all features for the start, although servers could experience failures now and then. Otherwise Google spent the last four months making the service faster, better and error-free. Google wouldn't be Google if there weren't some features on the to-do list that they would want to integrate still this year.

Google presented its new product, with its intensive new technologies based on the HTML5 draft, at its Google I/O show in San Francisco. The software combines mail, chats, blogs, Picassa and an integrated networked document manager. Thanks to HTML5, the application runs completely in the browser. A large part of the source code is ready for download at code.google.com, with specifications for running your own Wave server also free online.