Why Google Wave might be the professional social software tool that we were looking for

I'm getting to know the Google Wave platform a bit better now, let me share my thoughts with you.

According to Google, Wave is a "a personal communication and collaboration tool". To me, Google Wave seems to be a combination of an advanced real time discussion forum, extended with a lot of functions e.g. for spelling/grammar checking, automated translation between languages, et cetera.

This might be the technical breakthrough in social software that we were looking for. One of the drawbacks of current social -, collaboration - and productivity software concepts is that content is always either a snapshot (of the original or copy) at some moment in time (e.g. blog, wiki, whiteboard) or volatile and difficult to grab (chat, im, micro blog/twitter/yammer). So, participating in the creation of content and reusing content afterwards is quite a challenge. And just that is what's needed to make social software of practical use in professional organisations. In a professional context you need to be able to, irrespectively of your location, timezone and communication window, participate in creating content, to be able to re-use the content afterwards in an easy way and to be able to show the process in which the content was put together.

I'm currently reading the Wave docs, viewing some video's, reading some papers that I will summarize in my next post.