Google Wave, incase you’ve been on another planet, is the next generation email service from Google – a new personal communication and collaboration tool that fuses email, instant messaging and multimedia content into conversation threads called “waves”.
With Wave, Google is not only attempting to do nothing less than restructure the Web around conversation threads, but in doing so, also take on pesky little upstarts like Twitter and Facebook by including much of the functionality they offer. Think of Wave as Android (yes, Wave is open source) for Web communication.
What is interesting from a Social Commerce perspective, is the opportunity Wave represents for a new generation of social commerce tools – think “review waves“, “preview waves“, “Q&A waves”, and “group buy waves”.
So right now Google Wave, the brainchild of the Google Maps developers, is in semi-private beta mode, and you have to your geek goggles on to survive the interface.
But Wave is likely to be strategically important to Google (not just for squashing Facebook and Twitter, or reinventing the also-ran Orkut, but as a key feature in the upcoming Google OS and as input for Web 3.0 semantic web development), and therefore Wave could be a solid platform for social commerce application development.
Request an invite for Wave here, and see use this ‘speed-preview’ video of Google Wave as creative stimulus for your next social commerce brainstorm.
