Several sites are reporting the news that 100,000 Wave invites will go out on September 30, but few are reporting the (to me) much more interesting point: Invites continue to go out as we speak, and I suspect today witnessed a significant widening of the dev preview. Why? They just added me to the pool.

I have no idea about the scope of the invites or how they are being distributed. Here’s what I know: There is a wave in my brand-spanking-new Inbox titled “Where are you from?” that had 302 participants when I first clicked on it, and now has climbed to 312 the the time it took me to hammer out this paragraph. Clearly people are being added to the sandbox as we speak.

I’m incredibly excited to dive into this sandbox for several reasons. First, I think it’s going to be a big player in the future of the Internet. Google is doing everything right here: It’s open source software, it’s an open protocol, you have the ability to isolate your communications on your own server, and they’re doing early developer previews. You may say it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but it’s hard to fault their methodology and policies so far. If you want to know more about Wave, I highly recommend watching the Google I/O presentation (runtime: 01:20:00).

Second, I’m excited about what this could do to the future of Internet communities. As many of you know, blog/forum/chat integration is a major pain point for Icrontic and we continue to look into new ways to make this happen smoother and more effectively. Google Wave is a compelling way to organize all this information, and that’s why I applied for a developer preview. I want to evaluate Wave as a potential platform for our community in the future and see what I can do with it under the hood to make it work for us.

Of course my invitation to the Google Wave dev preview landed in my inbox the day I’m hustling to get a huge project out the door by tomorrow. I’ll write more on this as I have time to investigate it further. If I have any willpower whatsoever, that will be after this project ships.