Facing increasing danger coming from Facebook as number one website on the planet, Google has to do something about positioning itself against social media. The easiest thing to do for the giant was to use its existing capabilities, i.e. information retrieval, to index social networks. Google will become a social search engine and a real-time search engine.

But all this is not enough in my opinion. There is something that social media do that search engines cannot do and that is offering interaction between users who are holders of knowledge and who are willing to share it. Of course, Google has Friend Connect and has also bought Orkut to have social media products in its portfolio, but those are definitely not competition to Facebook. So Google has to come up with something different, something that offers new communication capabilities to users. Well, that thing is Google Wave.

Google claims that the Wave is chatting 2.0. This is mainly because 1) your ‘waves’ are broadcast, 1) what you type is broadcast in real-time, and 3) you can follow waves. So basically, we could say that Google Wave is Live Messanger meets Twitter! Now the analogy with Live Messanger is not so important. What really matters is that Google Wave can do something that Twitter cannot do so well: instant messaging. While it is possible to use Twitter for instant messaging, things get complicated when you want to follow a stream of conversation when you have of a lot of friends and followers. In other words, Google Wave is disruptive to Twitter’s domination of the broadcast-based communication model that it is dominating. My opinion is that Google can slowly take pieces of market away from Twitter and having a strong network of application developers complement the platform is going to be very helpful.