Continued from part 5: version control.
A social network platform has to be able to evolve with its users and with the communities it hosts. Twitter is for now the best example of how the platform – when it is malleable – evolves with its users. More complex platforms like Facebook and Ning are notoriously hard to change according to the preferences of their users.
Google Wave may have struck the right balance to make its entire platform customizable to a large extend. Google Wave offers free-text collaboration as Twitter does. Facebook and Ning have a more versatile data model that offer different kinds of functionality but at the same time creates content jails.
Google Wave offers one content model: the Wavelet. This again is very similar to Twitter which offers the 140 character message as its content model. The big difference between Google Wave and all other social network platforms is Wave’s distributed nature. It is this distributed nature that requires its associative memory architecture and it is this architecture which enables its extensibility.
Wave’s architecture gives organizations across the world the option to safely integrate their own users and systems in a global social network platform. This reality is comparable to how many organizations across the world today host their own e-mail servers and as such integrate in the global social network called e-mail.
This architecture gives anybody who cares to do so the option to integrate other systems with Google Wave and as such extend the platform for the benefit of her communities of people. In retrospect, it’s not obvious how to build a social platform that users can set to their own hand that is not based on an associative memory architecture. In other words, modern social platforms that users can customize may need to be based on an architecture similar to Google Wave.
Complicated and dedicated data models like Facebook and Ning will probably not be the future of social platforms. Google Wave’s P2P architecture emphasizes the Twitter anomaly: instant messaging through a central server architecture is probably not the future.
Google Wave’s architecture and capabilities as a social platform point to two important new developments: the importance of open standards (see the Wave protocol) and the importance of open-source software. Compare this to MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and Ning which are not only central server architectures but also closed to innovation.
The next and last post of this Google Wave series will be about the marketplace for third-party extensions that Wave will create.
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This is an excellent post. It was exactly the type of information I was looking for noone seems willing to answer. It’s always about.. well you can connect their API to what we’ve developed.
We need to start from scratch and have the option to wait a little before we do so. Question is: what if you build your own platform then integrate wave. One can login, then create a wave. But how do you connect it to your other waves. So you probably have to login with your wave account.
Is that where “google wave Federation” (or whatever it was called) comes in ?