By the looks of it Google wave is going to be the next big thing. I think I have told some of you about what I think will be the  future means of communicating over the internet. Where content becomes generic (i.e. it doesn’t matter whether you’re sending, text, photos or cook books :) ) and the content is filtered through a subscription and addressing model. I.e. I want to see everything Scott does online, but only  Bryan’s posts on fluorescent monkeys, while on the other hand Lena may want to send out a message and designate it to all three of us and we will then all receive it if it doesn’t conflict with any of our filtering rules. This is all done in a centralised way, integrating all our internet activity on flickr, tumblr, fb, etc and combining it with e-mail/IM/voip.

And I’ll be damned if google wave isn’t the platform on which such a model can be built. It’s

1. Centralised, there is one point of entry, one interface for online communication
2. An open standard, with APIs which ensures that it’s
3. Extendable! there’s only so much google can do on its own, but allowing developers and users to feed into waves is a brilliant means of reinforcing and safeguarding the first point.

The killer asset of Google Wave though is that it has evolved beyond the walled-garden approach that Facebook, Flickr and friends have taken to content. If one of these companies go down or change its content policy in ways that don’t suit you, they either take your content with them, or have you use their service under unfavourable terms. With many years worth of content captured by the services over the years, users won’t be able to simply move on to a better provider as their networks lock them into a particular service. With Waves that will be a thing of the past! You will host whatever content where ever and however you like. It’ the next step in the social internet: moving the emphasis from people’s network, to the people themselves.