Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wiki, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, robust spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between 40 languages, and numerous other extensions. It was announced in Google's official blog on July 20, 2009, that the preview of Google Wave will be extended to about 100,000 users on September 30, 2009. At that point, the current view of the http://wave.google.com Google Wave website (which is a preview with the keynote embedded), will be replaced with the application itself.The name was inspired by the Firefly television series in which a Wave is an electronic communication (often consisting of a video call or video message). During the developer preview, a number of references were made to the series such as Lars Rasmussen replying to a message with "shiny", a word commonly used in the series to mean cool or good, and the crash message of Wave being a popular quotation from the series: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!".Google Wave is designed as the "next generation" of Internet communication. It is written in Java using OpenJDK; its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Instead of sending a message and its entire thread of previous messages or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, objects known as "waves" contain a complete thread of multimedia messages (blips) and are located on a central server. Waves are shared and collaborators can be added or removed at any point during a wave's existence.