Ride the Wave

Since my recent annoyance of Facebook and their need to add unnecessary features, I have been looking for a new outlet for my social networking needs. While researching for my interest group, I came across Google Wave. I am unbelievably excited about this compilation of the greatest hits of social media. For those of you that don't know, Google Wave is Google's newest social networking site. It combines aspects of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management to build one elegant, in-browser communication client ( Mashable). I believe that Google Wave has the potential to win over my heart. Unfortunately, Google Wave hasn't been released to the public yet. It's only been released by invitation and those have mostly gone out to developers to help work out glitches. I have been avidly using Mashable to figure out Google Wave has to offer to the social media realm. The coolest extension I found was:

Twave- a Twitter extension for Google Wave. This basically embeds a Twitter feed into your Google Wave page. It has the capability of doing everything you would normally do on Twitter, except you can do it from Google Wave.
Google Wave also has a "playback" feature that allows you to playback a conversation from the beginning. This feature can also be used on Twave, so users can see what order their followers tweeted. How awesome is that? Not just for Twitter, but in general. I mean, I can't even say how many times I tune out of my Facebook chats and then find myself super confused when I deign to pay attention again. With this feature, I can playback from where I tuned out, and catch up on all the excitement.

I think Google's decision to join Twitter instead of try to work against them was smart. As of now, I don't have any complaints about Twitter, so it will be nice to see the two as a collaboration. Twitter is still growing and with Google Wave's capabilities, I think the two will go far together.

This is only one of the many extensions that will be coming our way from Google Wave. I agree with Mashable , Google Wave has the potential to be a "game-changer" in the social media realm. I can only hope that it can live up to all the hype and take the world by storm.