Google hopes to open up Wave in 2010

Google Wave could be finally opened out to the public by the end of 2010, according to the product's co-founder Lars Rasmussen.

The 'Preview' version of Wave has attracted huge attention, despite the difficulties in explaining exactly what the application does.

The collaboration tool / chatroom / instant message / messageboard project from Google had 2 million applications for an early look – and is being used by several hundred thousand – but Rasmussen is hoping to increase that number in the coming 12 months.

"We've already invited more people than we expected," Rasmussen told TechRadar.

Rough timeline

"We try to under-promise but we expected around 100,000 in the first month," he added. "We actually put 100,000 in pretty quickly, found the bottlenecks, got rid of them and got a lot more people in, but right now we're keeping it level.

"Roughly speaking our expectation is we will stay in the hundreds of thousands of users this year, look to get into the millions early next year and, if things go super-well, we'll try to open it up completely by late next year."

So if you haven't asked to be on the beta or don't know anybody that can invite you, you can at least hope that someone will have found a better way of explaining exactly what Wave does by the time you can sign up.