Move over Ashley and Mary-Kate: Twins Lars and Jens Rasmussen invented Google Wave

Google Wave has gotten a ton of attention this week in the wake of Google’s expanded test of the communications and collaboration tool. One of the most interesting behind-the-scenes stories is that Wave, which some observers have said could eventually replace gmail, is the brainchild of twins who work for Google.

Jens and Lars Rasmussen (shown above in that order), who work in Google’s Sydney, Australia offices, came to Google in 2004 when it acquired their year-old mapping startup, Where 2 Technologies. The technology from that startup is now the heart of Google Maps (here’s a clip of Lars explaining how Google Maps came about).

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Google’s buyout of Where 2 for an undisclosed sum was one of the company’s relatively early deals. It has expanded its reach greatly in recent years via a long list of acquisitions that includes YouTube and GrandCentral, the company whose technology led to Google Voice.

It was Lars, in a post to the official Google blog on Tuesday, who broke news of an invite-only preview of Google Wave to developers. In part, he wrote:  “[W]e believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you’re just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.”

All this does have me wondering about whether any other famous twins have contributed in a big way to the IT industry.