Google Wave is set to be a pretty exciting new Internet platform. Testing is starting, so soon we should be hearing more about it. Hopefully soon it will be ready for public use!

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we’ll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

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. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn’t quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we’ve focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

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. We’ll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you’re just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we’re intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet’s Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team’s most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google’s Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we…

Google Mail Server is Down!

I cannot access GMail of Google Chat. Other Google products appear to be working. Actually, Analytics is playing up, as earlier I could not set up a new account. Sudden feeling of panic – over reliance on Google and the cloud?

OK, ISP’s in the past have had their far share of downtime, but we have come to expect better from our friends at Google. Isn’t their infrastructure supposed to be the best? How are they going to run their Chrome operating systems in the cloud if their web mail service fails? Come on Google, get wake up the spanners and coders and get it fixed! I have work to do!

In the last few weeks we have seen some interesting developments coming from both the Google and Microsoft camps, which could indicate a shift for both companies in their direction, and therefore the future of the internet.

Google has released its first operating system, Android. There are rumours that Google is creating a desktop operating system to rival Microsoft Windows and Linux. If these rumours turn out to be true, then Google is moving into new territory, and will be competing directly with Windows. These rumours have been further stoked with the emergence of Google’s browser, Chrome. There are suggestions that Chrome is intended to be much more than a simple browser, it will allow Google to improve functionality of web applications. And it is here that we see Microsoft moving in Google’s direction.

Google’s emphasis to date has been for free software provided on its own servers – Google documents, GMail, Blogger, Google Sites and Google Pages, Calendar etc. etc. Even though the performance of its Blogger software could be enhanced if there was a desktop version (Blogger has poor FTP support for those hosting Google blogs on their own domains) they refuse to move in that direction, as their emphasis is on hosted applications. Microsoft, on the other hand, has always provided its software on disk, with a licence. However, last week we heard that Microsoft will soon be offering an online version of its Office bundle, albeit with advertisements.

So, is Microsoft moving into Google’s hosted applications territory? Will Google attempt to move into Microsoft’s desktop operating system territory? What will this mean for the internet, and for these companies? Diversification can be a dangerous strategy for a company. Google’s strength lie in search and advertising. Although criticised for an over reliance on its search engine, Google does now dominate the search engine market. By moving into Microsoft territory it risks diluting its brand. Unless of course it chooses to use the Android brand for its desktop operating system, and keep Google separate for Search. And will Microsoft Office online erode Google’s own online documents? And what of Microsoft’s other internet venture, its new CMS (website content management system) which seems to be taking on both Google’s Blogger and other offline CMS’s such as WordPress, in one hit? And it is open-source, which looks like a seismic shift in company policy. The new CMS from Microsoft is called Oxite. It is built using the new ASP.NET MVC framework and is highly extensible, with features such as Microformats and source control integration. Will this revolutionise the way people build web pages? Is Microsoft planning a range of free software options, all served on the “cloud”. If so, it will be finding Google waiting, and hopefully ready for battle. Can they actually collaborate on projects, or will it be all out War in the Clouds?

It seems that both Google and Microsoft have realised that their market share is threatened, and both are trying to take the middle ground before the other gets a firmer foothold. Google appears to be becoming more commercially focused (there has been criticism of its decision to allow the advertising of gambling in the UK and alcohol in the USA). This must be to further boost Adwords/Adsense revenues. And Microsoft is creating open source software, and provide free versions of it Office software, which has always been responsible for generating much if its revenue.

Exciting times for the internet. Could this be what Web3.0 really is – The Battle For the Cloud? Web3.0 – Cloud Wars.