Google Wave goes public in Apps portfolio

Lars Rasmussen, manager of Google Wave, said at the Google I/O developer conference that the time had come to take the application out of invitation-only since its launch last year.

"We are opening up Wave to everyone today," he said. "We are making Wave part of Google Apps. Wave shines as a place to get work done, and changes the way you work."

The code is much faster and tighter than at launch, according to Rasmussen, and includes new templates and tutorials. Wave will also be updated to make it more portable to smartphones.

Google is making a big push for the enterprise space, announcing a deal with SAP's StreamWork collaborative tool and support for Salesforce.com.

Google has also changed the status of the Robots API used to integrate Wave into other applications. Robots will no longer be limited to Google Apps and will be usable across the internet.