As we previously reported, starting tomorrow Google will widen access to its innovative communications platform Wave, offering 100,000 new invitations to use the service. Many of these people in turn will be allowed to invite others to join as well, reminiscent of how GMail propagated. (It’s wise for Google to allow these new users to invite friends and family because you effectively can’t use Wave without contacts on the system.) Those who will gain full access tomorrow will apparently be developers, early users who provided feedback and some Google Apps customers.

My earlier blog post provided some initial “hands on” reactions to the service. It’s a powerful and flexible tool that defies easy categorization. As I said earlier this month:

[Wave] looks a lot like an email client. But Wave permits multiple people to interact in real-time with each other. It’s a mix of email and IM with some Twitter and iGoogle thrown in. Speaking of the latter, Wave will spawn a developer ecosystem and permits existing Google Gadgets and the new social gadgets to work within it. In other words, developers can build apps and users can access or import them within the platform and individual waves (conversations).

There’s also drag and drop photo sharing. One cool related feature allows full-screen slideshows of images added by any user participating in a wave. (Yahoo has been taking incremental steps toward something more like this with its series of Yahoo Mail upgrades.)

Wave can also act as a Twitter client or embed Twitter clients (and one would assume eventually Facebook too). One could also imagine it as a feed reader for news. Indeed, third party developer efforts will enable Wave to grow and change, built around basic functionality of real-time communication and collaboration. One could easily imagine Google Voice and Google Talk integration into Wave, and so on.

Accordingly Wave has huge potential, but people will definitely need to use and experiment with it before they understand and see its benefits. There’s a clear learning curve and some complexity surrounding the product; it’s not entirely intuitive. Wave probably also needs to incorporate email in order to go mainstream.

Google still considers Wave to be in “preview” as it works out kinks and bugs of one sort or another. As it releases Wave more broadly Google will gain considerable feedback, which should help it add features and refinements. Here’s the video demo of Google Wave in action from the I/O Developer event in May.

Google has more in its blog post this morning.

Postscript: There’s an already emerging developer ecosystem around Wave. These “extensions” (widgets, plug-ins) will make Wave’s value and use cases more obvious to new users and will speed adoption. For example, see the Ribbit extension for conference calls or 6 Rounds for video chat.

At the end of next month, September 30, Google will expand the current “developer preview” of Google Wave to roughly 100,000 consumer users. According to Google, “included in this group of early testers will be some of the businesses using Google Apps.” In anticipation of this wider release, Danny and I got some time with Lars Rasmussen and the rest of the Google Wave team the other day.

By way of background, Danny and I wrote about Wave when it was first announced earlier this year and then offered some third-party developer observations.

Without doing a full “review,” I’ll offer some initial thoughts from my 50 or so minutes with the Wave team and hands-on experience with Wave:

It’s an exciting — possibly breakthrough — product that eludes simple categorization. Wave does lots of things and has the potential to do many more. However, there’s almost a “cultural” adaptation necessitated by it. People have to get used to communicating in a kind of “layered” way that Wave both allows and almost requires.

The screenshot above, from our Wave demo, looks a lot like an email client. But Wave permits multiple people to interact in real-time with each other. It’s a mix of email and IM with some Twitter and iGoogle thrown in. Speaking of the latter, Wave will spawn a developer ecosystem and permits existing Google Gadgets and the new social gadgets to work within it. In other words, developers can build apps and users can access or import them within the platform and individual waves (conversations).

There’s also drag and drop photo sharing. One cool related feature allows full-screen slideshows of images added by any user participating in a wave. (Yahoo has been taking incremental steps toward something more like this with its series of Yahoo Mail upgrades.)

Wave can also act as a Twitter client or embed Twitter clients (and one would assume eventually Facebook too). One could also imagine it as a feed reader for news. Indeed, third party developer efforts will enable Wave to grow and change, built around basic functionality of real-time communication and collaboration. One could easily imagine Google Voice and Google Talk integration into Wave, and so on.

It may be premature to discuss this, but a key to the mainstream appeal and adoption of Wave will be its ability to incorporate existing email accounts and to function as a client for traditional email.

During the demo most of the emphasis had been on enterprise or B2B collaboration. It struck me that teens would recognize this as a social tool and potential successor to IM — and would take to it accordingly. I made a comment along those lines and Google’s Rasmussen conveyed an anecdote about a test with Sydney (Australia) 3rd graders who used Wave and apparently had a great deal of fun with it.

That’s saying something if both developers and 3rd graders can equally use it. However, as Wave rolls out and more people are exposed, more of its potential and an expanding list of scenarios and use cases will likely emerge.

I’m in the Google Wave press conference, following a dizzying keynote — dizzying, at least, after a night of little sleep. As he did yesterday Google co-founder Sergey Brin joined the discussion and similarly apologized for arriving late.

Danny live blogged the keynote earlier this morning. He jokingly compared Wave to Lotus Notes. In some respects that’s not an entirely inappropriate comparison, given the scope of the product and the emphasis on collaboration — though the Google folks would probably disagree.

Wave seems to be conceived as a total communication and collaboration tool and therefore a successor and replacement for IM and email. In some respects then this is as ambitious as Android, perhaps even more so. It also encompasses mobile communication between users and mobile to PC communications in theory. The keynote presenters demo’d Wave on the iPhone and Android running in the browser.

One of the reporters in the in the room asked the panel about how they thought they were going to get people to change their behavior and abandon email for this new tool. Google responded that what they showed was an early “developer preview” and that there was still lots of work to do and a longish time horizon for the product. What wasn’t discussed was the way that social networks (and Twitter to a lesser degree) are taking the place of email in many instances. So it may not be such a huge problem to shift behavior in the end, provided the user experience is compelling to people.

Wave does seem to me to be a bit bulky and complex, from the blur of screens and demos I saw this morning sitting on the floor in a hall with more than 1,000 people. But the real-time aspect of it — the fact that you can actually see the other person typing — is pretty compelling.

This is a project that unfolded in Australia with 100 Google engineers and began in 2007. It was based on a general concept pitch to Brin by the developers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who had previously built Google Maps. Based on that track record Brin said he approved the project and associated resources (not unlike a movie studio approves a pitch by a trusted director or producer). It sounds like Google has spent a bunch of money on this (no figures were discussed) and is pretty invested in its success.

There is no apparent business model (though one could imagine enterprise licensing) and Google intends to open-source it, which is probably smart from an adoption standpoint. Yet stepping back Wave is consistent with Google’s larger effort to move software and applications development into the browser and the cloud.

Currently, many people who use Google’s services, including web search, Gmail, Google Reader and other products are either down or incredibly slow for some Google users. For Danny and myself, we are able to access these services with no problem. However, if you look at recent Tweets about Google, you will notice that many people are having extreme difficulty for the past hour or so.

The Google Apps status page does confirm issues for some users. The question is, how many and for how long? It does seem fairly wide spread.

There are more people covering this at Techmeme.

Postscript: Here is the official post from Google on the issue that effected 14% of their users.

Google is removing one of the most common excuses for not using Gmail: “It’s such a pain in the (beep) to switch!”

The company announced a new tool that simplifies the process of importing emails and contacts from other providers, including bigger competitors like Yahoo Mail and Hotmail.

All new Gmail users have access to the import feature via the renamed “Accounts and Import” tab in Gmail Settings. The import feature will be “slowly rolled out” to existing Gmail users.

The import tool currently supports close to 50 email providers. You can see the full list in Gmail Help.

Gmail has now been offline for the past twenty minutes or so. Just take a look at Twitter Search to see how many people are upset with the downtime.

Here is a screen capture:

This outage seems to be impacting both web access, pop access and imap access.

Hopefully this outage won’t be as long or serious as the one from last August.

Update: Gmail is coming back online now. The outage was maybe 30 minutes. @Google Tweeted an apology:

Our apologies to all for the short Gmail outage early this morning…it’s fixed now. Dashboard status http://bit.ly/18em6F

The newest addition to Gmail Labs is an option that adds a Google search box to your Gmail inbox interface. When activated, the search box appears below the “Labels” section of the left navbar, like this:

(Of course, there’s a drag and drop option in Gmail Labs, too, that will let you move the search box wherever you want in the left navbar.)

When doing a search, the results appear in a new window that overlays the bottom of the email list. From my testing, you’ll get a max of three search results and no more than one AdWords ad. Clicking one of the search results will open the page in a new window or tab. The search box also includes options such as “Send by email,” “Reply with result” and more, depending on what you’re doing in Gmail at that moment.

The Google search box can be activated by going to the Labs tab under Settings. You can read Google’s announcement for more details about how it works.

Gmail and Google Maps are two of Google’s hottest properties, while YouTube and Google Image Search are falling on the list of the most popular Google properties. That’s according to Hitwise data that tracked U.S. visits to Google sites during the month of March:

Gmail is the big winner here, surpassing YouTube as the number two Google property — something Greg reported last month. Google Maps is also on the rise, perhaps spurred recently by the dislay of Google Maps listings on non-local queries.

To put this in perspective, we can turn back the clock to early 2008, when Hitwise showed YouTube as Google’s number two property, and Gmail in the fourth place spot:

In addition to Gmail, Google Maps continues to take a bigger piece of the overall Google pie, up to 2.25% in March from 1.56% in early 2008. You could go back even further to a post I wrote charting Google Maps growth, which shows that it got only 0.79% of all Google traffic in late 2006.

Overall, Google’s “we’re-not-a-portal-even-though-we-have-everything-a-portal-has” philosophy is taking a hit: Google.com shows a 1.6% drop in share since early 2008, which means all those “non-portal” portal properties are rising as a group.

Yet another privacy complaint has been filed against Google with the FTC, this time by the Electronic Privacy Information Center over Google’s cloud computing services and related privacy and data security issues. While Google is the named party, the company is basically the stand-in for “the cloud” as a whole. (If you want to read the complaint, you can download it here [.pdf].)

Here’s the thrust of the complaint:

EPIC hereby petitions the Federal Trade Commission to open an investigation into Google’s Cloud Computing Services, to determine the adequacy of the privacy and security safeguards, to assess the representations made by the firm regarding these services, to determine whether the firm has engaged in unfair and/or deceptive trade practices, and to take any such measures as are necessary, including to enjoin Google from offering such services until safeguards are verifiably established. Such action by the Commission is necessary to ensure the safety and security of information submitted to Google by American consumers, American businesses, and American federal agencies.

The three services mentioned in particular are Gmail, Picasa and Google Docs. EPIC successfully filed a similar action against Microsoft’s Passport service and won fines and concessions.

The complaint asserts that Google represents to the public that its online services are secure but, EPIC argues, there are known flaws and Google disclaims any responsibility for privacy or security breaches. It claims that Google’s data security practices are inadequate as they stand, and so on.

Privacy has re-emerged as a serious issue and big consumer concern on a number of fronts.

Without saying anything about the merits of the complaint and whether the EPIC claims are accurate, the issues raised are important as we move into the cloud-computing era very rapidly. Mobile access to Internet content and services will further accelerate this trend.

Update: I spoke briefly to a Google spokesperson yesterday and he had this to offer on the record:

“We have received a copy of the complaint but have not yet reviewed it in detail. Many providers of cloud computing services, including Google, have extensive policies, procedures and technologies in place to ensure the highest levels of data protection.  Indeed, cloud computing can be more secure than storing information on your own hard drive.  We are highly aware of how important our users’ data is to them and take our responsibility very seriously.”

It also struck me after I wrote the item above that there’s something perhaps unnecessarily “vindictive” in EPIC’s complaint that singles out Google. The issues raised are serious but pertain not only to Google but to Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and others. So it’s curious that the complaint was only filed against Google. In addition the language of “deception” is quite aggressive.

Everyone has an interest in ensuring better privacy and data security and EPIC is doing something helpful in raising the issues. But there are probably ways to address them at an industry level that are somewhat less “litigious.”

Hitwise reported that “for the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube.” Accordingly, the measurement firm says that Gmail is now second only to Google.com in terms of visits among Google’s properties.

Gmail has recently had a number of problems, with several outages and problems of varying degrees of severity. I wonder if there’s a relationship between the growth of Gmail and these problems. As they say correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it would make sense.

I took a look at Compete and Google trends comparing traffic to Gmail vs. YouTube and those sources, less reliable perhaps, show something quite different (with YouTube the clear winner):

Undoubtedly these tools aren’t picking up many of the referrals to Gmail from within Google but it’s strange that these numbers are so far apart.