Google Wave is opening up to the general public for the first time Tuesday, the company has announced.

Just over 100,000 invitations are being sent out to users who had previously requested access to the web-based real-time communications service on a first-come, first-served basis. Wave invites should be arriving in e-mail inboxes throughout Tuesday night and Wednesday day.

Google Wave is a web-based application that marries multiple forms of communication, including chat, mail and wikis, into a unified interface that runs in one browser window. Everything inside Wave happens in real time: You can even see a comment being made as the person is typing it, character by character.

Wave was soft-launched in May with a public demo at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco. Access was given only to early testers and developers at the time, however (We were lucky enough to be invited to give it a spin).

Wave solves a unique problem for web users as we deal with the proliferation of web-based collaboration tools and real-time communications services. On one side, you have cloud-based document sharing, photo sharing, wikis and other tools for collaboration. Then there are services built for real-time communication — chat is an obvious one, but other services like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed (which Facebook purchased in August before releasing its code) also aim to make real-time sharing a bigger part of our online experience.

Efforts are ongoing to tie them all together, including the emerging Activity Streams data specification, which makes it easier for multiple real-time services to tell each other what users are posting or commenting on.

But each of these services and tools fills its own niche, and, for now at least, each occupies its own browser tab or, in Facebook’s case, its own section within a website. Wave is one of the only services trying to bring them all together into a unified interface.

“The observation that our communication lines are very fragmented — we’re certainly not the first ones to bring that up,” Wave engineering manager Lars Rasmussen tells Webmonkey.

And it’s also not a problem Rasmussen thinks his team can totally solve. However, he’s confident they will come close enough to make a huge impact on the emerging real-time web.

“Can you invent a single tool that has all the functionality of all the other tools? Maybe not. But in a year from now, we’ll have quite a lot of users who are in love with Wave even if it doesn’t completely handle everything they need for their communications.”

Tuesday’s release is not a general launch. Google is still pushing Wave out gently, so even though well over a million people have asked for access, Google is only honoring a fraction of the requests.

“We tried to invite a mix of people in enterprise, startups and schools,” Rasmussen says. He also says a very small number of paying Google Apps customers will be given access, and anyone involved in the developer tests over the summer will get to keep their access. The Wave team is based in Australia (the reason the launch is happening overnight in North America), and they made sure to give a higher priority to a few Aussie companies for now so they could collect some on-site, hands-on feedback.

Wave isn’t due for a real public launch until 2010. It’s still quite buggy, so Tuesday’s release is more akin to alpha or early beta software than a fully functional service.

“We wanted to give access only to people who have a high level of interest in dealing with preview-quality software,” Rasmussen says.

The team hasn’t been busy adding features. Rather, they feel the core functionality of Wave — the ability to replace things like long mail threads and online document sharing with real-time collaboration, sort of a “chat within e-mail” experience — holds enough value that they’ve simply been concentrating on improving the baseline performance.

“Latency is an obsession of ours,” says Rasmussen.

Some limitations within the browser are keeping Wave from running as quickly as he wants. When a Wave becomes long, for example, it can take awhile to open it. The team is working on a pre-loading system where you don’t have to load the whole Wave to start reading it or adding to it, just the first couple of pages. Then as you scroll, it keeps loading, speeding things up.

Another hang-up, one typical of young web applications, is that Wave slows down after you’ve used it for a few hours. This is due to memory leaks, and refreshing the browser page or restarting the browser solves it. But plugging those holes so browser refreshes aren’t necessary is the obvious goal.

There are two nice improvements in Tuesday’s launch.

First is that Wave is now tied to your regular Google account. Anyone who’s been involved in the sandboxed testing phase over the last few months has had to log in using a test account set up by Google. This account was kept isolated from your regular Google account, so you couldn’t use Wave to collaborate with any of your regular contacts. You could use Wave, but it was a little lonely.

Starting Tuesday, anyone with Wave access can now log in using their regular Google account. You’ll be able to communicate with any of your regular Google contacts who also have Wave access. You’ll also be given eight invitations each to hand out (Google’s calling them “nominations”). Anyone you invite gets put into the request queue.

The second improvement is a new system for installing add-ons. Developers have been busy building widgets that show off the real-time collaboration platform’s powers. Along with making those more accessible, Google has made installing them a simpler, two-click process.

Users will find a Sudoku game where you race against other people to fill in columns and rows in real-time, as well as a trip planner gadget developed by Lonely Planet.

Anyone running Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome will have few problems running Wave. Internet Explorer users who feel things to be a little janky or sluggish should try installing Google’s Chrome Frame extension for Microsoft’s browser.

See Also:

• Google Waves Goodbye to E-Mail, Welcomes Real-Time Communication
• New Google Plug-in Embeds Chrome Inside Internet Explorer
• Let’s Be Friends: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
• Facebook Open Sources ‘Tornado’ the Engine That Drives FriendFeed

Mozilla has added a feature to the coming Firefox 3.6 that will make it a bit easier to figure our why your friend’s web browser isn’t working. A new –about:support — configuration page in Firefox 3.6 is designed to make debugging and solving Firefox problems a little bit easier.

Firefox 3.6 (code named Namoroka) is still currently an alpha release and not stable enough to recommend for everyday use, but the Mozilla roadmap calls for the final version to arrive some time in November. When it does, the new about:support windows will make it dead simple to look up all the pertinent information about the current Firefox installation, including a list off all installed extensions, any user-modified preference setting, links to installed plugins and other configuration details.

The best part for those of us charged with trouble-shooting PCs for friends and family is that all the information inside the new about:support window can be copied by pressing a single (large) button. Your beleaguered, less-than-PC-savvy friends can paste the results in a chat window or e-mail and send you a wealth of information without you needing to spend hours explaining what extensions are and where to find them.

The new about:support window will be a boon to those trying to manage Firefox — and we don’t just mean you helping grandma when you’re home for Thanksgiving.

If you’ve ever wondered why much of the corporate IT world has stuck with IE 6, the answer is that IE 6, for all its other faults is much easier to manage when it comes to installing and updating thousands of workstations. There are some open source tools designed to help IT pros deploy and manage Firefox (notably Firefox ADM), but Mozilla has never shown much interest in making Firefox more enterprise-friendly.

While the new about:support window is a far cry from everything IT managers would from Firefox, it is a welcome (if tiny) step in the right direction.

Eventually, Mozilla would like to add self-diagnostic and repair tools to the about:support page, but such tools won’t arrive until after Firefox 3.6.

Firefox 3.6 is still an alpha release, so some aspects of the about:support window are still up in the air — particularly whether or not the profile folder location should be revealed. The Firefox profile folder is obscure and randomly named precisely to make it hard to find. Doing so prevents attackers from easily accessing it. Exposing that information in about:support could possibly make Firefox more vulnerable to attack, thus Mozilla does not seem to have made a final decision about including it.

Mozilla is hoping to get Firefox 3.6 out a bit more quickly than its last release, Firefox 3.5, which was delayed several times before it finally arrived in June 2009. Look for Firefox 3.6 beta 1 to arrive any day and, if all goes well, the final release should be here by the end of 2009.

See Also:

• Mozilla Shows What’s to Come in Firefox 3.6 Alpha Release
• Reach Out and Touch the Web With Firefox’s Coming Multitouch Support
• Mozilla Mulls Design Makeover for Firefox 3.7

Google Maps has a new trick up its sleeve — a web page for every place on Earth.

The new “Place Pages,” as Google is calling them, are individual web pages designed to give you all the information Google has about a particular place, including geotagged photos and videos, user reviews, popular places and related searches.

Unfortunately, there’s a huge downside to the new Place Pages: They ruin your ability to quickly and easily compare Google Maps search results.

In a blog entry posted Thursday, Google claims it eventually wants to have a web page for every place in the world — businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities. The new pages are useful if you’re searching for more than just an address, and in fact they make Google Map searches more like browsing a travel guide using than a search tool.

The problem is that Google Maps has changed the behavior of the “more info” links in search results. Previously, a “more info” link would open a bubble on the map with more details about that location or business. Clicking the next “more info” link in your results would re-center the map on the next result, and so on down the list. It was a quick and easy way to, for example, compare customer reviews for multiple locations.However, the new Place Pages have usurped the more info link. Now, if you click “more info,” you leave the search results page behind. The new behavior works well for destinations, but not so well if you’re trying to compare results since you need to keep hitting the back button to get back to the list of results.

On the plus side, unlike Google Maps URLs, which tend to be a long tangle of characters, Place Pages get nice, human-readable URLs. For example: google.com/places/us/california.

Google has also made Place Pages user-editable, so if you think Google is misrepresenting your hometown, you can correct it. And, if there’s no Place Page for your favorite place, you can always add it.

While Place Pages are actually quite useful and in many ways better than the old bubbles on the map, losing the “more info” link was a bad decision, hopefully one Google will correct in the future.

See Also:

• Google Maps Redesign Puts ‘Street View’ Front and Center
• Google Maps V3 Offers Easier, Faster API
• Google Maps Adds User Mashups