Company plans to begin sending out invitations to beta testers by the end of September

Google Wave – the ambitious, potentially ground-breaking new communications medium the company first announced earlier this spring – could be soon coming to a web browser near you. The company plans on sending out invitations on September 30 to users who previously expressed interest in testing the new service.

In a post to the Google Wave Developer blog, product manager Dan Peterson explained that the company intends to reach outside the development community (who have already been granted access to a “sandbox” version of the service) by sending out 100,000 invitations to regular users. Those users will be chosen from the “hundreds of thousands” of users who expressed interest in both using and beta testing the nascent communications platform.

Google Wave is the company’s brand new attempt to redesign Internet communications. In a nutshell, the new service is a cross between instant messaging and traditional e-mail, but that description really doesn’t do it justice. On the service’s about page, Google explains that “waves” – individual messages – are updated in real-time and sharable with others. There are a few example videos to demonstrate. The conceptual underpinnings might be a little difficult to wrap one’s head around, although in a sense the new service is not very much different from the hybrid chat and e-mail experience Google currently offers through Gmail.

Google Wave might revolutionize online communications, or it might prove to be an over-engineered effort to duplicate three things (chat, e-mail, and collaborative editing) that online users are already doing. Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to sign up to beta test – even if at this point you might be getting in a little late in the game.

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