Google Wave May Be A Game-Changing Social Networking Application
The public preview of Google Wave has created quite a buzz in the tech industry over the past few weeks days. Some are predicting Wave will be a revolutionary communication tool that could make email obsolete. Others think it will be the next global Social Networking phenomenon. But some think it will be a complete failure. Quite a wide range of opinions.
If you are not familiar with Wave, Google describes it as “an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.” Gina Trapani provides a better understanding of what that means in her lifehacker blog titled, Google Wave First Look.
I was not fortunate enough to get an invitation to participate in the public preview, so I have not had the opportunity to use and evaluate Wave first hand. But after seeing several online demos and articles, it is easy to see that Wave is a very unique and powerful new converged communication tool. I believe Wave will be a great communication and collaboration option for SoHo and Micro Office users that don’t have access to a full-fledged Unified Communication solution. I plan on writing a dedicated blog on that later. I also believe that Wave may become a very popular social networking application.
I think social networking users will be attracted to the ability to start a wave on a specific subject with a specific group of people. This seems more appealing than exposing all your online conversations to everyone in your online social network. Most of us interact as friends with multiple groups of people from our family, school, work, church, civic organizations, neighborhood and social networks. Combining individuals from all of these groups to create one group of friends for an online social network like Facebook can inhibit your conversations or cause unwanted issues. A humorous exchange with one friend may not be appropriate for co-workers. A political discussion with some of your friends may create tension with others in your network. Creating separate Waves for these types of conversations that only include the appropriate participants seems like a better way to manage an online social network. I also think the ability to respond directly and privately to individuals within a Wave is a great feature for social networking.
Google will need to add some functionality to Wave before it can be effectively used for social networking. For example, the creator of a wave will need to be able set user permissions and remove users from a wave if needed. Even if these features and other required functionality is added, it is hard to predict how Wave will be adopted and used for social networking. But it is easy to see the game-changing potential is there.
