Google Wave preview begins with 100,000 lucky users allowed in

Google today is preparing to unveil its new communications platform dubbed Google Wave to the wider public, with invitations to join the program being sent out to over 100,000 people across the world.

And those who are approved in the program will receive 8 invites each so that they can get their friends and family into the program and really test it out.

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning.

Lars Rasmussen, Engineering Manager & Stephanie Hannon, Group Product Manager at Google said today. Google Wave combines real-time messaging and collaboration and has been labelled the communication platform of the future. Its easy to see why the release of the preview version of Wave is being met with excitement all around the web, from Twitter where users are eagerly waiting to get their hands on an invite to the blogosphere where reports on the service can be found everywhere. This version of Wave that users will be testing out won't contain all the functions that, when ready, the full version of Wave will have, and is missing some glaringly obvious capabilities that the Wave team say are coming within the next few months.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave.

Those who miss out on an invite can hold out hope that Google will soon be allowing more users into the program, "all going well" within the coming months. If you are one of the lucky ones to get into the invitation-only program, let us know below. A full review of Wave will be coming soon.