Google has announced that Google Wave, the new communication and collaboration tool, will go live on 30 September 2009.
Google Wave is the most hotly-anticipated web application of the year. Until now, only 25,000 eager developers have been able to get their hands on the project. Google believes that Wave is the next ambitious step in online communication. The tool combines email, real-time chat, scheduling, wikis, micro-blogging, live feeds and more. Andrew was very impressed when he viewed the demonstration in June.
The HTML5-based application will be released as an open source product and a full API is available to developers who want to extend the service. Web site owners can also embed Wave widgets using a few lines of client-side code.
The Google Wave release also puts two other recent announcements into context:
- The new Google Chrome Operating System is highly likely to offer and promote Google Wave. It could be the killer application.
- Google Wave uses HTML5 and cutting-edge web technology. How well will it work in Internet Explorer 6? Perhaps this explains why Google is so eager to encourage browser upgrades on websites such as YouTube – even when those sites have no obvious non-IE6 features.
The initial service will only be available to 100,000 people, so it’s probably best to sign up as soon as possible. The company is expected to offer unrestricted public access a month after the first release.
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