Marketing Pilgrim

I’m certainly jealous. Google first showed off its new integrated communications platform, Google Wave, back at Google I/O in May. When I first heard the stories, I was all ready to roll my eyes and berate the new technology. IM and email and pictures and social networking-type stuff in the same place? Get real.

And then I watched the video. I don’t doubt that it would be overwhelming to some. But the more you look at Google Wave, the cooler it looks. And now 100,000 testers are going to get to look pretty closely at the platform, starting tomorrow.

eWeek.com reports that the test will reach consumer and business users. Danny Sullivan also points out that this test may also include the capability to invite others—because, hey, what good is a communications platform if you don’t have anyone to communicate with? Read Write Web clarifies that each person invited will have the opportunity to nominate eight people to join, and Google will continue to exercise its final discretion.

As a refresher, some of the cool features of Wave include:

• Online/offline chat
• One-on-one or group chat
• In-line replies within chats (“waves”)
• Photo sharing, events and link sharing
• (Eventually) integration with email (Right, guys?)

More features are to come—some of which are pretty vital, such as privacy and permissions features, the ability to remove people from waves, etc.

RWW reports the invites will be coming to select people from developers currently working on their sandbox server, people who’ve signed up on the Google Wave site and some Google Apps enterprise users. IE users will be prompted to add Google Chrome Frame to their browser.

As the back-end support for the system grows, more invites will be issued—some to those so graciously nominated by their friends who are already testing. If none of your friends are on Wave yet, RWW says you can always play with the robots—no seriously, developers have already created bots for Google Wave. (These are the good kind, not the evil ones. I hope.)

What do you think? Are you looking forward to Wave? Is an invitation waiting in your inbox? (If so—please! Tell us whether it’s all we dreamed it would be!)