Can Google Wave Take Facebook One Step Further ?

Very strange ideas come to my mind on a regular basis. I guess that’s just the way I am. But then guess what, those strange ideas usually come to me in the weirdest places ever. This one came to me as was taking my shower. It appears to me that with Wave coming up, Google could very well take over Facebook. At first glance one may think both products are not related and that’s completely true but when you think about it with a certain angle (the way I do it showering…), things make more sense.

One of the reasons I hardly use Facebook is because it’s a mess. The social service first became popular because it was a free alternative to those who wanted to get back in touch with their college mates. Then people started to add their friends. Then they added their family members. And their colleagues. And some add their professional relationships. Some people also add contact from various places, in my case, people from France, from the USA, from the UK or Germany or Italy…

Sure, Facebook is a great interactive tool. But there is one problem: I don’t speak the same way to all those people. Paradoxically, people are having very personal discussions with family members in a given language that is also visible by their collegues or foreign contacts. It just doesn’t make sense. Besides, Facebook does not offer options to filter your wall. Basically, I would like to be able to categorize my contacts and be able to choose who can see each of my updates by simply checking a box.

So why Google Wave ?

When introducing Wave, Google basically described it as a private wiki editor. Instead of sending an email, the user would create a new conversation on a central server and simply invite the contacts of his choice to participate in it or to edit the conversation. For Google, Wave shoud replace email by offering a real time conversational tool mixing email and instant messenger. Wave will be extendable with modules/applications produced by third party developers in order to enpower the collaborative aspect of the tool. If this could very well define tomorrow’s email system this could certainly appeal users like me who would like to be able to filter their updates over at Facebook. A conversation sent to my family could be a sort of private wall updated on a regular basis in which all sorts of medias could be integrated. One of those plugins enables the user to embed a wave (a conversation) in a weblog and use it as a commenting system.

So much for this shower-thought. We’ll see how Wave performs when it launches later this year.

http://yahoovibes.com/2009/08/can-google-wave-take-facebook-one-step-further/