Google Wave

http://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

Excellent article discussing the next web 2.0 in social networking via chatting across the internet. Google Wave seems to be a complete integrated of its services that interactino can be exchanged among many people.

For chats, GWave shows each letter you type live as you transmit. so no more: ' person x is typing message '

People can file drag and drop file transfers and share and edit documents simultaneously. Also, you can add blogspot to partcipate in the conversations, too.

It also makes it really easy to manage albums, too.

This should be coming out very late this year, but exciting to hear!

If you guys want to sign up:

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

Here's the 2 hour presentation. Starts at around 7:00 in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

Google wave seems like a really interesting thing to keep up with. It promises to link up all your social networks - and also transcend them, with complete interaction with any network running the wave API.

I watched the keynote, and there was one thing i found amusing. When they talk about twitter, they mention how twitter has the "search" function, and how they searched google wave the day before the reveal, and there were only 2 hits - neither of which were actually about google wave. When they used the wave api to search the search, there were already thousands of hits for Google wave - the information cascade at work.

Demos are actually good examples of information cascades. Not only is it that information is spread around by everyone who hears it, but when people applaud at speakers, it's all an information cascade about when to start and stop - it always picks up and dies down - it doesnt just start and stop.

Another interesting point - did anyone hear about Microsoft Bing? It launched on the same day. I was just amused, becuase it was like two information cascades going against each other, where one just completely demolished the other - seems that not as many people found bing as interesting.

Yahoo 360 was marketed as another type of social networking experience that Yahoo will close down in July. Yahoo was a mixture of personal blogging, along with messaging and status updates. The main page, http://www.johnniemanzari.com/images/articles/yahoo360.jpg , provided the users with status updates on their contacts as well as a link to post to their blog, and to see other blogs as well. To relate to current social networking sites on the market, it is a mixture of status updates of Facebook and Blogger. The site never gained popularity and is now going to be closed by Yahoo, who initially were thought to have closed it over a year ago.

The death of Yahoo 360 just shows how fragile the social networking medium is. Some sites take off with intense popularity, like Twitter, while others take some time to build, like Facebook did, and even others will eventually die out, think Xanga and probably MySpace. All these different social networking sites appeal to different audiences, but it is only the ones that offer a lot of features that appeal to the larger population that actually keep alive.

What makes Google Wave particularly interesting (I actually wrote a post about it before I found this topic) is that it resembles a lot of what Yahoo 360 was. Google wave provides status updates on your contacts, with information about what they have posted. Likewise, there is a feature to comment on pictures and videos, similar to the blogging feature on Yahoo 360, then of course there is the chatting feature. What sets Google Wave apart is that there are not only more features than Yahoo 360, the implementation is also much better. Not only can you comment on pictures and videos, there are projects that users can collaborate on, making using of GoogleDocs technology. There is the more seamless chat function alongside the email inbox. Finally, the event planning is far superior.

Will Google Wave over take the social networking industry, I personally think so. It is more than just a site, it is an online application that provides users with many rich features that have already have been tried and tested with Google. Google Wave is more like Yahoo 360 combined with Twitter and Facebook, providing a user the complete experience of social networking.