Google invites developers to early preview of Google Wave -- a new model for interacting online

Toronto, 28 May 2009—Developers at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco today received a preview of Google Wave, a product which takes a fresh look at how we communicate and collaborate online. Google Wave will be made available to a small number of developers worldwide to allow them to contribute to the technology before it is launched to the public. A video demo is available at sites.pressatgoogle.com/googlewave.

Google Wave aims to re-think what a single communications platform might look like if we started from scratch. With Wave, multiple users will be able to exchange real-time dialogue, photos, videos, maps, documents and other information forms within a single, shared communications space known as a ‘wave’. Everyone invited to the wave will be able to insert a reply or edit the wave directly, see instantly what fellow collaborators are typing, and even publish a wave to a blog or website where the content will update instantly as the wave changes. The aim is to allow people to communicate and work together in a richer, more instant and integrated way.

“Two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s. Since then, so many different forms of communication have been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks have dramatically improved,” said Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager for Google. “With Google Wave, we’re proposing a new communications model that presumes all these advances as a starting point. After more than two years of expanding our ideas, our team, and technology, we’re very eager (and a little nervous) to return and see what the world might think.”

Google Wave will test such new ideas as:

* Concurrent rich text editing - See on your screen almost instantly, letter-by-letter, what your fellow collaborators are typing into a message or document in a wave.
* Playback - Watch on your screen how the conversations and content in a wave have evolved over time, step by step.
* Integration with the rest of the web - Any developer can build extensions to Google Wave using our open APIs, embed waves in other sites, or build applications that interoperate with Google Wave. Waves are meant to work fluidly with the web. Furthermore, we’re planning to make Google Wave open-source in the coming months.

Today we’re making Google Wave available in an early preview to a small number of developers, so we can get feedback and input into what’s possible with waves. Information is available at http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html and on the Official Google Blog.