Here’s a comment I just posted on the Buzz Machine’s story about Google Wave.
Don’t know what Google Wave is? Check out a video of the Google team announcing it at some geek conference.
Here’s my comment:
This could replace Facebook – it allows for better communication with more ability to import/export stuff for users who are focused on what matters to them: The people they know.
It won’t replace news gathering … and I don’t think that’s its intention at all.
However, though it appears to be 10X more powerful than facebook and 20X more powerful than standard e-mail alone, the question arises: Can it draw the audience that MySpace, Twitter and Facebook has?
The great thing about the other three social networks I just mentioned are that if you join, it’s not long before old friends and acquaintances start finding you. The more you friend, the more you find/find you. It grows and grows.
I wonder how one would search Google Wave for their peeps?
Didn’t say it would replace news. Said it would be a new way to create the right kind of news – live and collaborative. Wave can be used to create web pages. That simple.
The instantaneous editing abilities that Wave seems to allow – the video showcases three people knocking out cutlines on a photo gallery – could help revolutionize how news is produced. If newspapers were smart enough to employ it. All the systems I’ve seen patched together in newsrooms have been overpriced and/or underutilized.