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Google Wave Beta Service Starts This Week

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DailyTech

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We already know a lot about the collaboration service coming from Google called Wave. The new Wave platform has so far been seen only by developers and press at events designed to showcase the platform’s capability.

Since Wave was first introduced, Google has been signing people up as beta testers for Wave in exchange for the users reporting bugs in the platform. Google is now set to roll Wave out to 100,000 of those beta testers as the next step in taking the Wave platform to the big time.

Starting on September 30, the 100,000 beta users will be able to start using Wave. The Wave service is a collaborative environment that allows users to share all sorts of content like video and documents as well as voice and video chat services.

Wave first broke cover back in late May and in July, it was offered to thousands of devs for testing. However, the new test pool is much larger than the original tester pool. The release to a much larger beta tester pool is a lead up to the official public offering of Wave.

Forrester analyst Ted Schadler said, “Because Google Wave requires people to think about working differently, it’s not clear yet what the sweet spot will be. However, you can bet that vendors and CTOs will be watching this with interest to see what develops.”

Wave also has functionality similar to a Wiki in that users can write documents to share with others on their wave and that content can be edited by any other user on the wave. Third-party companies are also looking at wave as a platform to launch other types of software offerings. British Telecom plans to launch VoIP gadgets for the Wave platform as an example.

Schadler continued saying, “It’s a time of experimentation. We see many companies and plenty of vendors, including all the big collaboration and productivity vendors, looking at new forms of document-based collaboration.”

_© 2009, DailyTech