Google Invites Developers To Ride Its Wave

Come on in, the water's fine. Google (NSDQ:GOOG) Wednesday issued invitations to developers to test its new online tool, Wave, which marries realtime communication with natural language tools. Google also has asked developers to create their own APIs for the Wave offering.

The new technology lets users create a "wave" and add people to it. Members of a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets and feeds from other Web sources instead of having to use just "plain vanilla e-mail," as the creators call it.

In addition, users can directly insert a reply or edit in the wave. And since it's live, concurrent rich-text editing, users can instantly see what their fellow members are typing in their wave. Wave also features e-mail gateways that link to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Natural language processing is another Wave feature, which is basically an automatic spell correction system.

"We want users to focus on typing and not worry about mistakes," said a Google developer in a presentation. "We think that if people just loosen up a little bit, maybe they can type 5 to 10 percent faster."

Google issued invites to 100,000 developers, who can each ask five other testers to join their wave. The company said that developers will be able to do things like build their own blogging sites, editing tools and other functionalities.

"We think the world will be a much better place if this is an open system that everyone can build Wave services on," said co-creator Lars Rasmussen in an online demonstration.

Wave was created in 2004 in Australia by Rasmussen, a Google software engineering manager, and his brother Jens, the same team that developed Google Maps.