Google just officially announced that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave tomorrow. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-served basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.

What is Google Wave?

Even after using Google Wave for a few months now, it is still hard to describe exactly what it is. It’s as much of a real-time chat room as a platform for editing documents collaboratively. It can also be used as a Wiki, to replace email and IM within an organization, or just to organize a pub crawl, as Wave’s Lars Rasmussen points out in today’s blog post. There can be no doubt that Wave feels oddly familiar, especially because of its typical Google design, yet it also represents an alien concept for most users, as it combines so many services into one extremely flexible package but still remains deceptively simple to use.

We got a chance to talk to the core Wave team, including Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon, last night. They were obviously quite excited about the launch and told us about some of the details regarding the invitation process, Wave’s current features, and some of the team’s plans for the future.

Highlights

We will look at the details of the launch below, but here are some of the highlights:

• Google will send out more than 100,000 invites tomorrow
• they will go to three groups: current users on the sandbox server, users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com over the last few months (first-come, first-served), and a few select enterprise users on Google Apps accounts
• more invites will be sent out as the team expands capacity
• users will not be able to invite their friends to Wave directly, but every Wave user will be able to ‘nominate’ 8 friends who will get to the front of the queue for new accounts
• all Wave accounts will move from the sandbox to the wave.google.com domain
• Wave’s contact management system will be integrated with Google Contacts
• the Wave team will highlight robots and widgets from a select number of vendors
• Internet Explorer users will be prompted to install and use Chrome Frame

Wave.Google.com

While the early Wave testers were on a wavesandbox.com account, starting tomorrow, all of these accounts and all the new users will move over to the wave.google.com domain. If you have tested Wave before, don’t expect any new features yet. The Wave team plans to add new features over the next few months, but the current focus in on making sure that the system can scale.

Nominate 8 of Your Friends

Unlike the Gmail beta, Google Wave users who get into the preview tomorrow won’t be able to invite friends directly. Instead, they will be able to ‘nominate’ 8 of their friends for accounts. As the Wave team plans to continue to send out additional invites as it stabilizes the system and adds capacity, these nominated accounts will move to the front of the queue and should get accounts relatively quickly.

For tomorrow, Google officially says that it will send out about 100,000 invitations, though as the Wave team told us yesterday, it will probably send out a few more than that.

Google Contacts

Google Wave will be able to tap into your Google contacts (the developer preview didn’t offer this feature). For now, it will only show contacts who are already using Google Wave, though.

Invite a Robot to Your Wave

On Wednesday, 100,000 users will also be able to use some of the robots and widgets that the developers in the preview wrote over the last few months. These range from widgets that allow you to play games with friends to sophisticated teleconferencing apps, with Twitter and blogging apps in between. We will have a close look at some of the more interesting applications tomorrow, but the featured apps will include a real-time, competitive Sudoku game, a Lonely Planet travel widget, and video chat from 6Rounds and a teleconferencing plugin from Ribbit.

For now, Google Wave will not feature an app store or marketplace for widgets and robots. Instead, every user will see a wave with a small number of featured apps in their accounts and be able to install these thanks to the new installer process the Wave team introduced just a short while ago.

Chrome Frame

When Google launched Chrome Frame, it’s Internet Explorer plugin that can replace the IE rendering engine with Google Chrome, the Wave team already announced that it would support this feature. And indeed, when you go to the Wave homepage with IE, you will now be prompted to install Chrome Frame. As Lars Rasmussen told us, the team is very enthusiastic about Chrome Frame, as it allows the developers to focus on features instead of making sure that Wave runs in Internet Explorer.

In our own experience, Wave definitely works best in Chrome. It will work just fine in Safari and Firefox, though for the most fluid experience, Chrome is currently the best browser.

Still Some Kinks to Work Out

The Wave team stresses that there are still a lot of problems to work out before Wave can really live up to all of its promises. While there was some doubt that the Wave team could actually get the system scaled up and ready for a wider launch earlier this summer, our experience with the developer preview has been very positive over the last few weeks and we definitely noticed that the system became fast and more stable. Now that 100,000 new users will join in, we will obviously have to wait and see how well Wave can scale up to this kind of demand.

For now, chances are that Wave will still crash at times. For major updates, the team will also have to take the whole system down for a few hours now and then.

Missing Features

Some features, however, still need to be implemented. Some of these are quite basic, like the ability to remove users from a wave, while others are a bit more complicated, like the ability to set specific user permissions on a wave. According to the Wave team, many of these missing features will be implemented within the next few months.

How Will People React?

Overall, it will be interesting to see how the Wave infrastructure holds up tomorrow and how people will react when they first see and use Wave.

The iPhone has all the ingredients necessary to build the first popular location-based game that combines the real world with fantasy — a scenario long dreamt of by gamers. A handful of games like Parallel Kingdom have gotten some traction, but they have yet to really catch on on a large scale. And while Foursquare has gotten quite a bit of attention, particularly in tech circles, its gameplay elements are very rudimentary. Now a new game called gpsAssassin may have struck gold by fusing location and the popular campus game Assassins with the text-based games that have become immensely popular on social networks, Twitter, and the iPhone.

Founder Nicholas Holland says that he’s had some difficulty describing the game, largely because it looks very much iMob, Mafia Wars, and similar games that don’t rely on your location when you play them. And while gpsAssassin may share some of the same mechanics with these — it’s primarily text based with leveling, attack/armor ratings, and other key RPG elements — its location features turn it into a different beast entirely.

After picking a nickname, the game presents you list of possible actions, the most important of which is “Scan for targets”. This will bring up a list of any players within a five mile radius (anyone within a two mile radius is shown under a list of ’short range’ targets). After tapping on someone’s nickname, you enter Attack mode, where you choose from a list of actions.

This is where the game’s real fun kicks in: you can choose from a list of available attacks created by other users, which range from silly (‘Throw Nail Polish” or “Robotic Kitty”) to more conventional forms of violence. Better yet, you can get creative and think up your own attack, which is especially fun when you personally know the person you’re attacking. Your target will then be informed that you’ve attacked them with whatever weapon you choose, and depending on your strength they’ll find out who emerged as the victor.

This is all, of course, dependent on where you are physically located. If your favorite victim picks up shop and drives across town then you won’t be able to attack them with your ‘Gospel of Chuck Norris’ or ‘Mullet of Fury’. Holland says that gamers have been known to actually change their driving routes so that they can get in their attack on an unsuspecting victim and get out of dodge before they have a chance at retaliation. He also says that he’s seen neighboring offices band together to wage war against a cross-town competitor. Clearly, there’s plenty of room for friendly (or not so friendly) rivalries to emerge.

While most people will probably spend most of their time thinking of especially infuriating (and hilarious) attacks, gamers can further boost their stats by fighting against non-player characters. And the game offers virtual goods that you can use to boost your stats and win/loss percentage without the time investment, which is where the game will make most of its money.

The application has been available in beta since February but Holland staggered its release by initially pricing it at $5.00, then $.99. Now that it’s ready for mass consumption, gpsAssassin is available for free, though there are a handful of premium versions that come with more of the game’s virtual currency.

Google just officially announced that it will send out 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave tomorrow. These accounts will go to developers who are already in the developers preview and users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com on a first-come, first-serve basis. A select number of Google Apps users will also get access to Wave. Google first unveiled Wave in May and since then the team has focused almost exclusively on making the system more stable and scalable.

What is Google Wave?

Even after using Google Wave for a few months now, it is still hard to describe exactly what it is. It’s as much of a real-time chat room as a platform for editing documents collaboratively. It can also be used as a Wiki, to replace email and IM within an organization, or just to organize a pub crawl, as Wave’s Lars Rasmussen points out in today’s blog post. There can be no doubt that Wave feels oddly familiar, especially because of its typical Google design, yet it’s also represents an alien concept for most users, as it combines so many service into one extremely flexible package but still remains deceptively simple to use.

We got a chance to talk to the core Wave team, including Lars and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon, last night. They were obviously quite excited about the launch and told us about some of the details about the invitation process, Wave’s current features, and some of the team’s plans for the future.

Highlights

We will look at the details of the launch below, but here are some of the highlights:

• Google will send out more than 100,000 invites tomorrow
• they will go to three groups: current users on the sandbox server, users who signed up for accounts at wave.google.com over the last few months (first-come, first-service), and a few select enterprise users on Google Apps accounts
• more invites will be send out as the team expands capacity
• users will not be able to invite their friends to Wave directly, but every Wave user will be able to ‘nominate’ 8 friends who will get to the front of the queue for new accounts
• all Wave accounts will move from the sandbox to the wave.google.com domain
• Wave’s contact management system will be integrated with Google Contacts
• the Wave team will highlight robots and widgets from a select number of vendors
• Internet Explorer users will be prompted to install and use Chrome Frame

Wave.Google.com

While the early Wave testers were on a wavesandbox.com account, starting tomorrow, all of these accounts and all the new users will move over to the wave.google.com domain. If you have tested Wave before, don’t expect any new features yet. The Wave team plans to add new features over the next few months, but the current focus in on making sure that the system can scale.

Nominate 8 of Your Friends

Unlike the Gmail beta, Google Wave users who get into the preview tomorrow won’t be able to invite friends directly. Instead, they will be able to ‘nominate’ 8 of their friends for accounts. As the Wave team plans to continue to send out additional invites as it stabilizes the system and adds capacity, these nominated accounts will move to the front of the queue and should get accounts relatively quickly.

For tomorrow, Google officially says that it will send out about 100,000 invitations, though as the Wave team told us yesterday, it will probably send out a few more than that.

Google Contacts

Google Wave will be able to tap into your Google contacts (the developer preview didn’t offer this feature). For now, it will only show contacts who are already using Google Wave, though.

Invite a Robot to Your Wave

On Wednesday, 100,000 users will also be able to use some of the robots and widgets that the developers in the preview wrote over the last few months. These range from widgets that allow you to play games with friends to sophisticated teleconferencing apps, with Twitter and blogging apps in between. We will have a close look at some of the more interesting applications tomorrow, but the featured apps will include a real-time, competitive Sudoku game, a Lonely Planet travel widget, and video chat from 6Rounds and a teleconferencing plugin from Ribbit.

For now, Google Wave will not feature an app store or marketplace for widgets and robots. Instead, every user will see a wave with a small number of featured apps in their accounts and be able to install these thanks to the new installer process the Wave team introduced just a short while ago. For the future, though, Google plans to add

Chrome Frame

When Google launched Chrome Frame, it’s Internet Explorer plugin that can replace the IE rendering engine with Google Chrome, the Wave team already announced that it would support this feature. And indeed, when you go to the Wave homepage with IE, you will now be prompted to install Chrome Frame. As Lars Rasmussen told us, the team is very enthusiastic about Chrome Frame, as it allows the developers to focus on features instead of making sure that Wave runs in Internet Explorer.

In our own experience, Wave definitely works best in Chrome. It will work just fine in Safar and Firefox, though for the most fluid experience, Chrome is currently the best browser.

Still Some Kinks to Work Out

The Wave team stresses that there are still a lot of problems to work out before Wave can really live up to all of its promises. While there was some doubt that the Wave team could actually get the system scaled up and ready for a wider launch earlier this summer, our experience with the developer preview has been very positive over the last few weeks and we definitely noticed that the system become fast and more stable. Now that 100,000 new users will join in, we will obviously have to wait and see how well Wave can scale up to this kind of demand.

For now, chances are that Wave will still crash at times. For major updates, the team will also have to take the whole system down for a few hours now and then.

Missing Features

Some features, however, still need to be implemented. Some of these are quite basic, like the ability to remove users from a wave, while others are a bit more complicated, like the ability to set permissions of specific users on a wave. According to the Wave team, many of these missing features will be implemented within the next few months.

How Will People React?

Overall, it will be interesting to see how the Wave infrastructure holds up tomorrow and how people will react when they first see and use Wave.

One of the most popular Twitter clients for the iPhone is Tweetie. Winner of an Apple Design Award, the iPhone app (and the Mac OS X app) has defined the Twitter experience for many users.

Today, Tweetie’s developer, Loren Brichter announced Tweetie 2.0, coming soon for the iPhone and Mac OS X. The final Tweetie 2.0 iPhone beta was seeded to users this morning and if all goes well, the final version will be submitted to Apple later this week.

I’ve had the opportunity to play and use Tweetie 2.0 for several weeks, and below, we’re able to show you some screenshots of the new Tweetie and its features.

Complete Rewrite

Tweetie 2.0 is a complete rewrite of the original iPhone app and it combines the codebases of Tweetie for Mac and Tweetie for iPhone. This means that the applications will not only have more in common, but that changes will be easier to push out to both apps.

Tweetie 2.0 has a ton of new stuff – including support for the new Project Retweet that we previewed last week. The upcoming Twitter geolocation features will also be integrated as soon as those APIs become public.

Additionally, you have the ability to have your saved searches in Tweetie sync with Twitter, view threaded conversations, and link up your Twitter contacts with your iPhone Address Book – which is a great way to keep your contacts aligned (or to quickly call someone right from viewing their Twitter profile.)

New Features

Other features include:

Preview short URLs
Block/follow from multiple accounts
Receive device notifications from select users
Full landscape support (fully configurable)
Improved gesture support
Drafts management
A multiple attachment manager, hashtag picker and more
When you start the app you go right back to where you last were when you quit and caching makes it fast and easy to keep up with new and older tweets.

Still Simple and Sexy

The entire application is really a joy to use. What made the original Tweetie so great is still there, along with all kinds of features that leverage not only the new Twitter APIs and third-party services, but the new iPhone OS 3.0 features too.

Tweetie 2.0 is a whole new app, and it will require the iPhone 3.0 OS and will cost $2.99 in the App Store, the same price as the original Tweetie.

For Mac OS X users, Tweetie 2 will be a free upgrade for all existing users.

What do you think about the new look and features of Tweetie 2.0? What is your favorite iPhone Twitter client?

Oh how the mighty have fallen. The one time king of social networks, MySpace, now has the honor of being the site where the less affluent members of the online population stake their claims by way of bedazzled profiles overrun with auto-playing videos and songs. Meanwhile, the upscale, financially solvent users have moved on – and by moved on, we mean to Facebook, of course. At least those are the findings of the latest social networking study done by American consumer behavior analysis firm Nielsen Claritas.

By no means is this the first time that the demographics of today’s social networks have been scrutinized and analyzed by researchers, nor is it the first time that they’ve come to this same conclusion. Earlier this summer, for example, Anderson Analytics looked into this same topic, studying trends among social networking users on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They found that Facebook users tend to be better off financially, while MySpace users’ income was the lowest out of the four networks studied.

Those claims are now being further backed up by the Nielsen study, which, in addition to noting the financial discrepancies, also discovered that many social networking users tend to be urbanites, especially those engaged in blogging and tweeting.

The study examined seven of the most popular social networking and blogging sites including Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, ClassmatesOnline, and LinkedIn. Through the Claritas product, Nielsen segments their online panel of 200,000+ participants into demographically and behaviorally distinct groups which include everything from “Young Digerati” to “Heartlanders.” After doing so, they found a notable difference between the two top social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace.

According to the research, the top third of lifestyle segments relative to affluence (aka the “richest” users) are 25% more likely to use Facebook than those in the lower third. The bottom third segments related to affluence (aka the “poorest”) are 37% more likely to use MySpace. Also of note, Facebook users are more likely to use LinkedIn, a site for professional business networking, and again, another factor which points towards the differences in demographics between the two social networks.

Besides confirming the income discrepancies between MySpace and Facebook, Nielsen also discovered that those involved in blogging and tweeting tend to live in more urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. The 12 “Urban” lifestyle groups tracked by the company are more likely to use Blogger, WordPress, and Twitter than the 22 “Town and Rural” segments. However, there was no mention of these groups being more affluent, just more urban.

Apple today announced that a total of 2 billion apps have now been downloaded from the App Store. There are now over 85,000 apps in the store, up from 65,000 on July 14, and the number of developers has grown from 100,000 in July to around 125,000 today. Every day, iPhone and iPod touch users now download close to 6.6 million apps every day and this number continues to grow.

The App Store is obviously one of Apple’s most important assets in the mobile market. While Microsoft’s Zune HD, for example, is getting a lot of favorable reviews, the absence of an application ecosystem makes it a far less compelling product than Apple’s more expensive iPod touch product line. On the iPhone side of things, competitors like Windows Mobile, Android, and Nokia also have nothing to offer that comes close to matching Apple’s App Store – even if we assume that a lot of these 85,000 programs are fart apps and single-book eBook apps.

It would be nice if Apple gave us a better breakdown of the kinds of apps it actually delivers (free vs. paid, games vs. utilities, etc.). This kind of transparency is obviously not in Apple’s DNA, so we depend on data from third-party services like AdMob for this information. According to AdMob, iPod touch and iPhone users are more likely to buy apps than users of any other mobile platform and are also more likely to interact with mobile ads.

For developers, no matter the grumblings about the App Store approval process, the App Store is simply the largest and most lucrative marketplace for their work right now.

Google’s everchanging logos, or doodles, as they call them, are stuff of legend. Recently, however, Google has started changing logos more often, pointing out to various events, people, and causes about once per week.

After the recent mysterious series of logos and tweets, which turned out to be a tribute to H.G. Wells, the current Google logo is an obvious tribute to Chinese philosopher Confucius, who was born on 28th of September, 551 BC. Besides being a philosopher, reformer, and a generally smart dude, Confucius was especially well known for his sayings; you can find a nice list of them here.

But this is not the only new Google doodle in the past 24 hours; a couple of hours ago, Google was spelled with two l’s (Googlle) in the logo in celebration of the company’s eleventh birthday, which falls on 27th of September.

I’m sure many of you have heard the news that, after a few meeting with Apple’s top guys, China is expected to get the iPhone. According to Engadget, China Unicom will be announcing today that they will be launching the iPhone on October 1st. Below are the package details. Looks like Apple’s 50 Million device count is about to go way up!

Eight service packages ranging in price from 126 yuan (about $18) to 886 yuan (about $130) per month will be available to Unicom’s 141 million subscribers from a pool of 700 million cellphone toting Chinese. How much will it cost? 5,000 yuan or a steep $733 green retail. Subsidies of about 893 yuan (about $131) to 4,253 yuan (about $623) will be offered for those signing to long-term plans on Unicom’s fledgling 3G network.

Original post HERE.

I’m going to try writing longer form stuff for the weekends, sort of to stretch the old mental legs a bit and share a bit of the stuff that is floating through my transom, man, about tech and especially mobile and portable electronics.

Come back with me to 2001. A young man got up on stage one afternoon in November to announce something new and amazing: an operating system dedicated to tablet computing. That young man was Microsoft’s Bill Gates and that operating system was Windows XP Tablet PC edition.

Chances are that is the first and last time you saw a working tablet computer. Laptops, then, were monsters. They were heavy – 10 pounds or more – had small, bad batteries, and WiFi was just a dream for most people. It seemed, in those dark years, that laptop manufacturers could shave off pounds and complexity by removing the keyboard and offer a pen-based OS. After all, this was a post-PalmOS era when handwriting recognition was an input option we all knew and understood.

The thinking was this: if you can streamline appellations – data entry applications being the target here – you could sell smaller, more expensive computers to medical and business clients. It didn’t work and Windows Tablet PC has been little more than a clever solution to a nonexistent problem.

So what’s with all the tablet talk lately?

We have entered an era of the thin and light computer and, rather than worrying about power we’ve become obsessed with the concept of thinness. This is why Apple, in their wisdom, created the MacBook Air and the iPod Touch. This is the same reason we are all salivating over the thought of tablets thinner than an issue of BusinessWeek and this is why laptop manufacturers – and Michael Arrington – are rushing to make them.

The Apple Tablet (or iPad or Tapplet) is real. It will have a capacitive touch screen and manufacturing difficulties are slowing down the tablet’s release to a crawl, thereby preventing us all from having one. It will be thin and, like the abhorrent HP DreamScreen, will focus on media. The extant tablet verticals – mostly in the medical industry – will still exist.

Note this new focus. Rather than trying to create a business machine, manufacturers understand people want bigger screens on which to consume web and media content.

So what can we expect in the next year? Well, first we have the CrunchPad. When all the bugs are worked out, it will be an amazing device – I’ve seen it. And I’m not just saying that because I’ve been intimately involved in the design process, because I wasn’t – that gives me a bit of perspective. Expect the CrunchPad to be a excellent device for blogging – that’s what Mike made it for – and for web apps. Don’t expect much in the way of media.

Then there’s the iPad. This will eclipse the industry and for the rest of the year that’s all you’ll hear about. Trust me. Apple could require you to give this device three drops of blood every morning in order to satisfy the demonic hell-beast soul trapped inside it and we would, gladly. The release will be on par with the iPhone release and they’ll sell a million of them.

Then you have Microsoft’s Courier. It’s impressive, but it’s Microsoft; don’t expect that thing to take shape for two years and don’t expect it to take off until the second generation. Like the Zune, Microsoft will make a product but they won’t make it good until they have a little time to mull it over. I don’t think the Courier will be a player in 2010.

As for the rest of the devices, expect slow uptake by price conscious consumers and folks who don’t think it’s “cool” to own “name brand” technology and are real “hackers” (read: teenagers and European students). Archos, for example, is doing a lot of good work in the tablet space but they’re an also-ran. They are going the Tablet OS route, which is no good. Creative has some devices planned and it’s also clear that ChromeOS could power a nice device – provided HTC makes it.

As for connectivity most of these will have a 3G option – although I doubt the iPad will have 3G built-in. WiFi is an obvious second-best.

As for size, tablets, at least with capacitive screens, are weighed down by a huge hunk of metal that shields the electronics from the screen. This hunk of metal – and the glass – prevents us from getting a bigger iPod Touch and is what is keeping the iPad from coming out sooner. Once the world’s (i.e. China’s) scientists solve this problem we’ll get what we want. Until then it’s resistive all the way.

So prepare yourselves for the coming tablet wars and sock away a little cash because things are going to get interesting in 2010.

It’s Google’s 11th birthday on Sunday, September 27th: to celebrate, the company has changed its logo to a version that turns the letter “L” into the number 11. The logo is already viewable in Europe.

What’s interesting about the logo change is that Google’s official birthday is somewhat disputed: some often declare the company was born on September 15th 1997, the day the Google.com domain was registered. Meanwhile, Google filed for incorporation in September 1998: the papers were filed on September 4th, but Google has been known to celebrate on both September 7th and September 27th.

To explain the inconsistency, the company’s FAQ once famously read: “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.” In recent years, Google has taken to changing its logo on September 27th, meaning this has been taken as the “official” date.

If you’d like to learn more about Google’s intriguing history, Google it.

How has Google changed your life? Let us know in the comments!