Google is inviting 100,000 testers to preview its hippie-on-stilts communications platform – Wave – from today. Mountain View has extended its testing pool in preparation for pushing Wave out to many more users at some point soon. For now, though, Google isn???t revealing when the platform will be pumped out to the mainstream.

Instead it???s simply repeating the fact that Wave ???isn???t quite ready for prime time???. The company unveiled its new-age web platform at its I/O developer love-in back in May this year. Wave crossbreeds email with IM and document sharing, and exhibits a particular talent for near real-time interaction. In order to plump up usage of the platform, Google has already declared its intentions to open source Wave’s underlying protocol as well as a big heap of its client and server code.

via Google Wave: Testers line up for the love-in ??? The Register.