hree ways Google Wave could boost the Internet giant's bottom line.

Google hasn't yet finished previewing its new Wave collaboration tool, let alone given consumers full-blown access to it.

Google Wave is a collaboration and communication tool that allows users to work on the same content object, dubbed a "wave," which can house both text and multimedia. Users can reply to messages and edit together in real-time. Beyond those features, developers can extend Wave's features through a programmable interface.

Google is, at this point, focused on polishing and popularizing the product, rather than figuring out how to monetize it.

One very real possibility: incorporating Wave into Google Apps for businesses, the suite of Web-based software tools that Google licenses to enterprises for $50 per user per year.

Wave's next milestone will come at the end of September, when Google plans to let in a pool of about 100,000 testers. Rasmussen says about a third of those will be developers with existing access, and another third will go to some of the million or so people who've applied for access through Google Wave's public site.

Google will likely carve out the remaining third to Google Apps enterprise customers, Rasmussen says. That would enable Google to solicit the kind of feedback it needs to understand what works and what doesn't for businesses--and whether the tool brought the kind of value to Google Apps that would bring new paying customers to Google.