Google is Making Waves in Social Netwokring

How many of you out there remember Google Wave?  How about Google Buzz?  


Google Wave was a service based on online real-time collaborative editing.  This service was released by invite only, at first, and allowed users to video chat, share documents, edit those documents, and see changes made by other in real time.  It also tracked the changes so you could see who had done what.  This could have revolutionized group projects and business proposals.  There were only two problems.  First, as a completely new type of service to most people, there was quite a bit of a learning curve, not just to learn how to use but also in what situations it would be helpful to use the service.  Second, because of the slow, invitation-only roll-out, there were relatively few others using the service.  Speaking from personal experience as one of the first users of the wave in the general public (I don't consider myself part of the beta, early-adopter, trend-setting crowd), only one of my contacts was using Wave.  There was not a whole lot of incentive to learn all of its features, and we had few applications for it in our lives.  Google Wave is still available, to the best of my knowledge, but I believe that it is no longer being developed or released for new users.


Google Buzz is a social networking service that takes Twitter's lead and moves further.  You can post links, comments, pictures, etc... and share them with your contacts.  What's more, it is integrated directly into Google's mail application, which currently holds over 7% of the market share, if you will, for email clients.  Moreover, Google's mail app is growing in usage by over 20% annually, making it the second fastest growing email client, next to iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad.  Even so, most people don't bother with Google Buzz.


Now, Google is rolling out a new, more extensive, social networking site.  Look for my next post, with more details.