Google Wave set for beta testing

Google will tomorrow invite 100,000 volunteers to participate in beta testing of the new Google Wave program.

“In addition to the developers already using Wave, we will invite groups of users from the hundreds of thousands who offered to help report bugs when they signed up,” project manager Dan Peterson said in a blog posting.

“Select customers” of Google Apps have also been invited to test the program, Peterson says.

The beta release will be hosted on the platform’s own website, rather than the ‘sandbox’ developers have been using since the projects’ conception.

The system enables ‘waves’ of data including email, social networking messages, video, audio, photos and even voice messages to be combined in the same ‘inbox’.

It also lets users instantly see what others are typing, enabling online communication to take place in real time.

Earlier this year, Lars Rasmussen, who developed Google Wave with his brother Jens, said the program would make email obsolete.

But the product’s abilities place it in direct competition with unified communications vendors such as Microsoft, as well as social networking sites.

Commentators say the program’s accessibility will benefit SMEs once it is released.

“Google Wave may eventually revolutionise social networking, but I think the more immediate benefit of Google Wave is to provide small and medium businesses with an affordable alternative to the current unified communications solutions,” PC Worlds‘ Tony Bradley says.

But SmartCompany blogger Brendan Lewis says the development may not be the financial win Google hopes for.

“Traditionally, Google has been really good at advertising but failed to make money from almost everything else,” he says.

“Google Wave is quite a good product but t they haven’t been able to monetise other products.”

Google has not yet announced a timeframe for Wave’s general release.

Features including the ability to remove participants from a wave and configure the permission of users on a wave are still missing, but will be introduced “over the next few months,” Peterson says.