BEIJING, September 8 (Xinhuanet) -- Earlier this year, Google announced it was to launch a new product which would transform the way people communicate on the Internet. Google Wave is now set to arrive and be tested by 100,000 people who have preregistered to try out the new offering from the Internet search giant.

    On September 30th, the invitions will go out by email. And Google has also announced that it is opening up Google Wave to some schools and businesses that use Google Apps.

    Despite the company not having a set date for release, the excitement and hype surrounding Google wave is growing exponentially. "We don't have a specific time-frame for public release, but we're planning to continue working on Google Wave for a number of months more as a developer preview," the company said in a statement.

    This is not just email or a way of sending data to someone else. Google Wave has been dubbed as "game-changing" by Mashable, a technology website. The new Google product, for those having a Google account, is likely to change dramatically upon its launch, especially within business, education, customer service, email and social networking.

    Google describes its new baby as "a new model for communication and collaboration on the web" which will enable "participants on a wave to have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time." In GMail, Google's email system, conversations can be connected in what is called a thread. But Wave goes a step further enabling editable conversations to develop. Effectively it's rewriting the rules of email, Google says.

    In Google Wave a user can create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on the wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. Instant messaging is virtually instantaneous in Wave with text appearing as typed on the recipients computer, thus saving time. Several people can be involved in conversations and in addition private conversations may be inserted into the thread.

    Media can be shared easily with files being simply dragged from the desktop and dropped into a conversation thread. But there are still development issues. Designed around the new HTML 5 (Hyper Text Mark-up Language 5) those using older browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6, will be unable to use it. And as yet even HTML 5 is still lagging behind the development of Google's latest venture. Thus for some functions to work Google Gears has to be downloaded. Development of mobile interfaces are also not complete. But to develop the product better Google is releasing a "lion's share" of the source code to enabling developers come up with solutions and more applications.

    When complete, Wave promises to benefit many in easing communication. Advances include a contextual spell check, so someone typing "can I have been soup" would be corrected automatically to "can I have bean soup". The product can also facilitate simultaneous translation, so that one user may type in French while it automatically translates into English or any other appropriate language.

    Wave is fully integrated with Google's own social networking site Orkit but it also enables integration of Twitter and other social networking sites, as well as the embedding of video from sites such as YouTube. People can share a rich source of of information; video, maps, documents and conversation. Maps may not only be inserted into conversation threads but also edited by those taking part, such as adding tags and labels. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when, particularly useful if a user has not seen the development of a conversation whilst being offline.The whole thing adds up to a powerful business tool.

    A collaborative environment could build greater interactivity between businesses and individuals and create a better learning environment, Mashable's Ben Parr suggests. In the educational environment proofreading and the writing of papers would become easier and more coherent. It could also provide interactive tutoring from home. But it's not all serious. Some applications enable participants to engage in online games like chess or sudoku.

    It is unclear when all Google account users will have access. Some technology sites point to as late as 2010 as a general launch date since Google has much to do in terms of refining the product. It also has to build consumer confidence given recent failures in its GMail service which suffered an outage lasting nearly two hours earlier this month. More and more people are relying on cloud-computing, not only for email but also for the storage of files, documents and pictures. While data may not be lost from a web app outage, losing access for an hour or two can be aggravating and in some cases costly. But then no system is fail safe. In a 2007 study by both Carnegie Mellon University and Google respectively, anywhere from 2 to 13 percent of all hard drives will fail in a given year.

    (Agencies)