Google Wave beta opens September

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 22 Jul 2009 at 17:42

Google has announced that Wave, its attempt to revolutionise online communications, will hit public beta on 30 September.

The beta will be initially offered to 100,000 people who must sign up for a chance to try out the service.

Previously, Wave has been the domain of 25,000 developers who Google invited to "try it out" and build additional tools for the service using the Wave API. These early examples are impressively varied and include games, gadgets and a tool to embed Wave in WordPress blogs.

Wave was first demonstrated at Google I/O back in May and is essentially email re-imagined, pulling in features from instant messaging, social networks and blogs to create an intruiging new service.

Google calls it "the next step" in online communications, and claims it will be able to pull in feeds from third-party services such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.

There's a video demonstration available and given that Wave's much easier to watch than explain we recommend you head over to the site and take a look.