Google Wave is a social media sharing service where people can share text, photos, videos, maps, etc. Google decided to stop any further development on Google Wave in August 2010. But the development will now live on through the Apache Software Foundation incubator program.

Lars Rasmussen, the co-founder of Google Maps spoke publicly about why he decided to quit Google and join Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a personal pitch about why he wanted Lars to come to his company.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced that they are handing off Google Wave to the open source community. This is because Google decided to end development of Google Wave as a standalone product.

Real time collaboration software Google Wave is now open for everyone. Before it was available through invite-only. Invites started being rolled out this past September. If you have used Google Wave, what do you think of it? Let us know in the comments. [Google Wave]

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has launched an extensions option within the Google Wave Navigation menu.  As of right now, Google Wave is still an invite-only service.  The gallery of extensions is intended for users to discover tools that developers are making with APIs.  The gallery is a set of waves that contain extension installers. “As a tip, you can also use the waves in the gallery to share a direct link to your extension’s installer with other Google Wave users — simply open the installer and copy-and-paste the URL (note: the panel arrangement and search query are included in the URL, but can easily be edited out),” stated Google Wave Product Manager Dan Peterson.  [Google Wave Developer Blog]

In late September Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) invited about 100,000 people. Google asked their Wave users what they would like to see added to the chatting, e-mailing, real-time content sharing service. People asked for more invites. Now Google Wave has close to about 1 million users.

Earlier this week Google invited 100,000 people including many developers into the testing phase of Google Wave. Anyone that has an invitation to Google Wave can invite 5 people to the service. Google Wave starts with four modules.

The module at the top left is the navigation, the module at the bottom left is the contacts, the module in the middle are archived messages and e-mails, and the module on the right is real-time collaboration like IM, video-conferencing and document-sharing. Some of the extensions already made for Google Wave include Ribbit, Lab Pixies for Sudoku puzzles, Lonely Planet, and AccuWeather. SAP, Salesforce.com, and MediaWikiWave have developed prototypes using Google Wave for their respective software.

Google Wave was developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen. This is the team behind Google Maps too. A Google spokesperson said that Wave is “how email would look if it was invented today” in an interview. “It would be collaborative and there would be no barriers between live instant messaging, email and documents and so on.”