Select Google users can now make Waves

[Dubai]

Google this week began inviting people to test out its new online platform, called Wave (wave.google.com)

The new site mixes together elements of online communication, such as social networking and email, with collaborative editing, similar to what is found on sites such as Wikipedia.

The company said it has sent invites to about 100,000 developers and corporate user on Sept. 30. Journalists, including some in the Middle East, also received invites.

The site so far has limited functionality, but Google has said, both on its official blog and on the wave.google.com site itself, that the site is still in development, so a number of features are still unavailable and the performance will vary.

Given the number of people who received invites and their limited ability to invite more, the social networking side of Wave has yet to be developed. Users must be invited and join the service before they can particle in a "Wave".

While users who received invites to test Wave have been allowed to invite eight additional people, Google says those invites will not be going out immediately.

The additional invitees - those not invited by Google directly - will not be able to invite additional people themselves.

The idea behind the new site is that users will create a Wave, initially nothing more than a blank box on the right side of the screen. Other users of the site can then be invited to join the newly created Wave, which can be edited by all. Users can post richly-formatted text, documents, videos, links, Google Maps, and even widgets directly to the Wave.

A slider bar makes it possible to see all the earlier version of that particular Wave. The site also has built in translation tools in 40 languages.

Wave was announced in May and is an open-sourced, meaning third-parties will be able develop widgets for the site.

According to the Google Wave Developer's Blog, SAP, one of the world's largest developers of business software, and Salesforce.com, a Cloud-based providers of customer relationship management (CRM) software, recently demonstrated their work with Wave at Google I/O, a web developers conference, on Sept. 29.

Google has said it plans to open an online applications store, similar to Apple's App Store, to help promote the development of tools for the site.

Google has yet to announced any further release dates for Wave.