Google wave. The next next new black or something like that. Google always has some cool tool that gets the press, the wow factor, etc. I might regret this in a few years, but I think this one is different.
I'm waiting for all my friends to find me, and I'm trying to find them currently. It seems odd, as I took on a gmail account late in life, and live off my yahoo to this day. Reliable and not connected to my blog. Yahoo just allows for more anonymity. I use my three emails for access control like the land line we give out to anyone we don't want to call us while we are running around. The non-profit we donated to needs a phone number? No problem. Land line.
I want to use wave as a repository for all the stuff I do with my friends. The Boston Cask Society, the Turkey Fry, my weekly group rides, etc.
This brings up the larger question of social dynamics in wave. Will people I don't know be able to find my waves and join in this little group I'm starting that will function as a cycling listserve/board/email chain, but better? How googleable will google wave be? Will I be able to search for a wave for cycling groups in a town I'm planning on visiting, find a ride, drop in, meet some new friends, and walk away happy?
How will groups function in wave? Will wave become a single source to interact with private social networks and will these networks interact with the outside world? Will wave function as a private network blogger with all the content acting like a private invite only blog? Can it be used to replace the message board?
While that is still to be worked out, the strength of wave is not the communicative functions. Those technologies exist already in various states and make me feel like it will become another place I have to check into every day. One should not be interested in the various communicative functions being pulled together. The newness to this technology is the ability to pull existing and comfortable technologies together and, importantly, edit them. There can be a single message with an archive of iterations, new dates, new answers to Y/N/M polls or you can lose that data and move on. Who needs an archive 3 years deep on a message board with numerous private messages about rides, broken bikes, school/work schedules, and such. Throw all that in wave and edit at will. Occasionally edit out the old PM's by creating an archive and a redundant wave. The function of Y/N/M polls and editing of details (time and location of ride) makes it ideal for this.
Many have argued that this is a digital dark ages. We are not archiving enough of the data we are producing. Every blog post ever is not being saved for future academics. How will we live and understand our social condition without the intrigue and rumors floating around on the web. The redundant blog posts, tweets, board threads, etc and all the official web postings from official news organizations about (insert short lived news phenomenon here-- cf. balloon boy) will be lost to time immemorial if we don't do something is the idea. We could do research on the invention of the printing press by following back the dispersion of new books printed with this technology solely because there are sales receipts and advertisements from the 1500's still extant. Weirder things have been useful.
But I can choose what is important to me through the editing. No longer will all my scratching and clawing about where we should meet or is it at 8 or 9 be archived and that is a good thing. You can make a separate wave to hash that out and the central pillar that is the schedule is still sitting there asking if you want to go for a 50 mile ride on monday morning. This is the type of things that allows us to focus on what is important. It allows us to discern what we care about and what and when we decide to archive or edit.
Is the squabble over time important from 4 years ago, does the message board thread have to archive it as a chronological dump, a storehouse of dead moments or can we function in the now, allowing the narrative to develop for the future, edited to reflect where we are after the 50 miles that 4 people did on Mon Dec 1st. I have found very few message boards to be self-edited. It often turns into a shit show with egos, trolls, cliques, and flame wars as the norm. But the things that matter, the things that you want to turn into a wiki, are the things that would not be edited out in wave. I hope.
