Google Wave – will it be the dog’s bollocks?

For the past few days the internet has been all a flutter over Google’s newest app, Google Wave. The hype has been intense and expectations are high, but few people have actually been able to take it for a test drive, yet.

Google first announced Wave way back in May this year (2009) and since then a team of developers have been working hard on the project. The developer of Wave described it as “what email would look like if it were invented today”. Google describes wave thus:

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

On September 30 Google started to send out more than 100,000 invitations to developers who have been involved in the project, the first users who registered and offered to give feedback and select business and university customers from Google Apps.

Chances are you won’t be one of the people to get an early invite, but sit tight, hopefully soon we will all have access.

Stephanie Hannon is the Google Wave Project Manager, she is known as twephanie on Twitter and is using the account to keep people updated with how the roll out is developing.

Some videos from the Google Wave team