Sun
Google has begun inviting people to test ride a new Wave messaging platform that merges e-mail, online chat, social networking and “wiki“-style collaboration.
The California-based Internet titan said it will send out a total of 100,000 invitations to developers, people who were quick to sign up to provide feedback and customers of its Google Apps offerings.
“We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations,” Google engineering manager Lars Rasmussen and group product manager Stephanie Hannon said in a blog post announcing the preview. “Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it, too.”
Google has heralded Wave as an evolutionary step in Internet communication that will remove walls between various messaging and task applications to let people collaborate easily in real time online.
The preview is intended to let Google test the software and gradually scale it up to handle greater numbers of users, in advance of a planned public launch next year.
“This just means that Google Wave isn’t quite ready for prime time,” Rasmussen and Hannon said in their blog post. “There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement.”
Features in the works include being able to remove people from “a wave” or set limits on what capabilities each participant has in particular online conversations, according to Google.
“We’ll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready; over the next few months,” Rasmussen and Hannon indicated.
But if you are looking for an invitation to Wave, beware of infected search results. A rush of would-be users to the new service has brought a flood of spammers, scammers and malicious code.
Websense Security Labs’ ThreatSeeker network found Google searches related to the term Google Wave generated results leading to a rogue antivirus.
If you Google “How to get Google Wave invitation”, the search generates results that could lead users to click on sites infected with malicious code.
On Twitter, where Google Wave is a top trending topic, spammers were rushing to take advantage of the buzz by inviting Twitter users to “Follow me and RT” for an invitation. Spammers are using variations on Google and Wave to attract hundreds of followers to their newly created profiles.
Also on Thursday, Google rolled out search engine refinements as Microsoft strives to lure people to Bing and Twitter heightens appetites for real-time updates and news.
Google modifications include tools that let people limit online searches to only serve up results from the past hour, or by specific date ranges.
Google users can choose to be shown search only results from blogs, news, or webpages that they have visited or those they haven’t visited. To use the option, you need to be signed in to a Google account and have Web History enabled.
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