Via CNN
Google Wave, a product that promises to revolutionize online communication, will go out to about 100,000 beta testers Wednesday.

The Web application from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called a “hosted conversation,” or a “wave.”
Like Gmail when it was in beta, you may try Google Wave through inviation request. If you are really curious to have a try a long with other 100,000 beta tester, try to submit your request here.

To have a clue how it works, take a look at Lars Rasmussen’s writing, who along with his brother Jens, founded the idea and created the application.

If you really don’t have a clue about Google Wave, this is a little intro from Google official site:

About Google Wave

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Google acquires i.e. purchases Carnegie Mellon’s anti-fraud tool called Recaptcha.
Google has acquired a Carnegie Mellon University spin-off that seeks to cut down on spam and fraud at Web sites while digitizing books.

ReCAPTCHA offers simple word puzzles that users must solve when registering at a Web site or completing an online purchase. Computers can’t decipher the twisted letters and numbers, ensuring that real people and not automated programs are at the keyboard.

Unlike other word puzzles, however, ReCAPTCHA’s text comes from actual books, letting the system create a digitized version in the process.

Terms of the deal, announced Wednesday, were not disclosed. Google said the ReCAPTCHA tool will continue to be available for use on any Web site.

Google Inc. is already behind a major project to digitize books and put them online, mostly by scanning pages and using optical character recognition, or OCR, to make the texts searchable. OCR doesn’t always work on text that is older, faded or distorted. In such cases, often the only way to digitize the works is to manually type them in.
If you are a developer and programmer, don’t waste your time: work hard to create / develop a internet tools that can be beneficial for online community. Who knows, if it’s popular, Google will buy it someday.

This is good. I am waiting for and thinking about it for a long time.

Whenever I sign up / register to a free services, we are unintentionally or intentionally be subscribeb by the free service owner to receive a periodical email notification from their companies.

Now Gmail has the feature to easily unsubscribe from them infact from any email you don’t like. Sure, there’s already “Spam” command feature, but this “unsubcribe” feature is even better because there’re times when you don’t want to include a particular company’s email into spam category yet you just don’t like the notification.
Unsubscribing from mailing lists and newsletters you subscribed to a while back but no longer want to receive should be just as easy. Searching through individual messages for little unsubscribe links is too big a pain —you should be able to unsubscribe with a single click.

So we just launched something that makes this all work better, both for Gmail users and big email senders. Now, when you report spam on a legitimate newsletter or mailing list, we’ll help you unsubscribe.

… Clicking “Unsubscribe” will automatically send a request back to the sender so they’ll stop emailing you.

Google energizes efforts to cut consumer electric bills
Google Inc on Tuesday said it would use its software skills to help consumers track their home energy usage and thereby lower demand and the global warming emissions that come from producing electricity.