Google on Wednesday began inviting people to test ride a new Wave messaging platform that merges email, online chat, social networking and "wiki" style collaboration.

The California-based Internet titan said it will send out a total of 100,000 invitations to developers, people who were quick to sign up to provide feedback, and customers of its Google Apps offerings.

"We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations," Google engineering manager Lars Rasmussen and group product manager Stephanie Hannon said in a blog post announcing the preview.

"Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too."

Google has heralded Wave as an evolutionary step in Internet communication that will remove walls between various messaging and task applications to let people collaborate easily in real time online.

The preview is intended to let Google test the software, and gradually scale it up to handle greater numbers of users, in advance of a planned public launch next year.

Full story: Yahoo News