Wave - Real-Time Social Networking

What is that awesome social networking all about? In essence, it's maintaining a social graph and organizing data exchange over that social graph. On a reasonable abstract level, it's nothing more. The hype of social networking is decreasing nowadays, fighting some late battles with social gaming and stuff like this. Now it's nothing new or exciting anymore but the standard tool of communication.

In this very situation Google has launched it's Wave technology. In essence again, this is social networking on the next level. Wave looks like a browser based collaboration or group ware tool but in fact it's much more. It enables people to communicate and share documents in any way and - that's the point - all real-time.

Not enough real-time, it allows also to track whole histories of communications. Once brought together with geolocation you'll have an application reflecting any dimension of the human mind - time, space and communication.

One side of the coin is that with Wave Google is definitely the Microsoft of our days. This is the killer application the web was waiting for since the first days of dynamic content. An office suite or email client is a last century application, Wave is the new century. In conjunction with cloud computing - kind of a next generation operating system - Google is definitely on the top of the ecological pyramid. The other side of the coin is that Google reinvented social networking. There is not a single feature of recent social networks not included and seamlessly integrated in the Wave package.

So, if you ever think of integrating Wave into your social apps, you should be aware that in fact you do integrate your social graph into Google Wave.