by Denise

In late May, Google announced its newest application, Google Wave. This application is supposed to revolutionize the Internet. Google developers described it as what email would look like if it were invented now.

A combination of live email threading, instant messaging and wiki editing, Google Wave dazzled web developers and professionals across all disciplines. To boot? It’s open source. For everything there is to know about Google Wave, read Mashable’s complete guide.

After four months of drum roll, Wave debuted in late September. Since then, there’s been a bit of confusion. For anyone who’s watched the Google I/O presentation on Wave, it’s exactly as the video described. Due to the sparse number of people using Wave, it’s also created this sort of experience:

In the one-and-a-half months since Wave hit the scene, there’s been very little news about what developers are doing with it. Invites have been slow to come. After more than a month on Google Wave, I only recently got the ability to distribute 20 invites. As we’ve seen in the past, developers create the infrastructure, but the most innovative uses for web apps come from users. Perhaps Wave would benefit by widening its early adopter pool.

Anyway, The Rapidian and Wave: I personally hope that Wave will replace our static commenting system.

In this social media age, conversations on the same topic in different forums is common. This is amplified if the original source for the material (i.e.: an article on The Rapidian) has a barrier to entry (i.e.: site registration; take a look at Chris Apap’s article). The material is reblogged, tweeted and crossposted to Facebook. Although these sites aren’t specifically themed, Quantcast will tell you each are dominated by socioeconomic strats and more. With these walled-off conversations, there is little cross-pollination of diverse perspectives. Often times, instead of building on a conversation, the same ideas are being rehashed.

Waves are embeddable on blogs and Web sites. My hope is there will be tweaks so that users do not first have to register a Google account to register for a Wave account; for Wave to be compatible with the way user accounts have been structured (i.e.: all Rapidian site users agree to a no-anonymity policy)*; and for existing accounts to be easily ported over to Wave accounts on the hosting site. Assuming this pie in the sky is possible, if Wave becomes the universal platform for commenting, then everybody would be participating in the same town hall despite where in the interwebs they’re coming from.

For more cool ways people are using Wave, check out Lifehacker’s compilation.

*I realize this has its own issues because not all sites prescribe to a no-anonymity policy. It looks like the web is starting to trend this way, but maybe if more sites became OpenID hosts?