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.

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.”