Google Inc's highly anticipated real-time communications service is not "ready for prime time" but the company said it was on track to begin the biggest field test yet of the potentially groundbreaking Google Wave.

The internet search leader intends to launch a limited preview of the service, already tested by developers and considered one of the company's most promising innovations as it seeks to widen its footprint among corporate clients.

Experts say the project has the potential to advance Google's plans to provide software to corporations, as well as giving Google a bigger role in a social networking space now dominated by companies like Facebook and Twitter.

Wave, first announced in May, aims to combine instant messaging, e-mail, document handling and social networking features in one package.

In a pair of posts on the official Google blog, it also said it was exploring plans for a "monetisable wave extension store" that would allow developers to sell software that enhances the service's capabilities.

The comments come a day before Google sent invitations to access Wave to more than 100,000 developers, individual testers and "select" corporate users of Google Apps - a suite of office-oriented applications from e-mail to word processing - in the biggest field test of the new service to date.

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