Google Wave opens to 100,000 surfers this September

Waiting to get your grubby mitts on Google Wave? You'll have to wait just a little longer.

While some 6,000 developers got their hands on Wave on Monday, a post on the Google Wave developer blog says the company isn't planning to open it up to everyday users until 30 September. At that time, around 100,000 users will be let into the programme. To be a part of that first run, users will have to sign up to use the service on Google's invite page.

Along with a hard date on the semi-public beta test, Google also highlighted a few developer creations using Wave's API. One of them, called Waves in WordPress, lets bloggers quickly embed an entire Wave conversation into a blog post, which lets readers view and interact with it. Similar tools that let you do that with other social and blogging services can be expected as Wave's API matures.

First introduced at the Google I/O Conference back in May, Wave is Google's re-imagining of Web email, and a sibling of Gmail -- the company's current Web mail product. It blends live chat and email in one service, and is one of Google's most experimental creations yet. Google says it still has some more work to do on the project before it's ready for beta testers to start drumming on it, including how fast and stable it is.