Google Wave Begins To Swell With Developers; Wider Release This September

Google Wave, the search giant’s incredibly ambitious new Email/IM hybrid that was announced in May, is quickly picking up steam. As of last week the service was open to around 6,000 developers (most of whom had attended conferences like I/O), and Google is planning to send out an additional 20,000 invites over the next month. It looks like a big batch of them just went out, as we’ve received a number of tips about new invitations, and Twitter is currently abuzz with excited developers thrilled to finally get in on the action.

One other piece of news that will be very interesting to non-developers eagerly waiting to try out the service: Google is planning to release Wave to 100,000 users beginning on September 30th, using the service’s main wave.google.com hub rather than the developer site (we can likely expect a Gmail-like limited invitation system). By this time we can likely expect there to be a rich variety of Wave widgets — the site already boasts plenty of them, including a RickRoll widget and more practical things like a weather forecast — but you can’t try them out without a Developer Sandbox account.

Thanks to Noah Hendrix for the tip.
Image credit: thelastminute.