The web is buzzing with excitement and anticipation. In less than 24 hours, Google Wave will launch to 100,000 early adopters. The real-time communication platform has been making headlines ever since it was announced back in May as a result of its potentially game-changing features.
And while we’ve received our fair share of questions about Google’s newest product, one keeps popping up time and time again: how do I get an invite to Google Wave?

There Are Four Ways to Get an Invite

Google clarified things earlier today with an update to their blog. They specifically highlighted the four key ways you can secure an invite. Here are the methods and what you need to know:
1. You signed up early on for a Google Wave account. Google put up a request form for Wave invites not long after Wave was announced. Most of the invites arriving tomorrow will go to people on that list. Your chances improve if you signed up early on and wrote a message to the Wave team.
2. You have an account on the Developer Preview of Wave. The Sandbox version of Google Wave has been active for a select group of developers for several months now, allowing them to test Wave, report bugs, and build Wave extensions. They will all get accounts.
3. Some paying users of Google Apps will get accounts. It’s likely several companies asked Google for invites when the real-time tool launched. They will get accounts. Some schools that use Google Apps will also get early access.
4. You are invited by someone currently using Wave. This is the most intriguing revelation made today by the search giant. Here’s how Google explained it:

“We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.”

Do you know what this reminds us of? Gmail. Do you remember when it first came out and there were a select number of invites users could send out? I remember that people were willing to pay cold, hard cash for one of those invites. You might see the same type of frenzy over Wave.
Regardless, these are currently the only four ways to get an account on Wave. So if you don’t get an invite tomorrow, you still have hope. You’ll probably have to beg someone for an invite, though.

One month ago, Twitter announced Project Retweet, Twitter’s plan to officially support the popular act of retweeting as a feature. Currently, users reshare interesting tweets using the RT syntax (e.g. “RT @ev“). What Twitter intends to do is formalize the process by making retweets a core feature and displaying retweeters underneath the original Tweet.
The upcoming change has sparked a heated debate. Twitter’s leadership and others believe it will improve the user experience.
So who’s right? While we cannot foretell the future, we will say this: the current system is broken. The retweeting syntax is all over the place, and it is almost certainly scaring off potential new users to Twitter. A streamlined, cleaner, universal system fixes that problem. That’s why Twitter needed to initiate project retweet, and that is why it will change Twitter for the better.

Pros: Cleaner and More Efficient

Let me start with this: the current retweet syntax is all over the place. While most people use the “RT @username” syntax, many others add the RT at the end of their tweets while others utilize “via @username” instead.
This is a practice that is confusing new users and turning them off to Twitter. Just imagine if you stepped into a restaurant and they all talked in strange lingo that you half understood. Would you stay? Now what if that lingo kept changing? I mean, if you got this mess the first time you visited, you’d be turned off too:
The new retweet feature is constant throughout all of Twitter. It looks the same and works the same no matter who is retweeting or even what app you use. It clearly labels who retweeted the post without any acronyms that new users don’t understand.
While there are many pros to the new retweet feature (easier to count retweets, easier to see who retweeted you, easier to see what you’ve retweeted, provides more credit to the original twitterer), the biggest one is that it just looks better and works the same no matter who you are. Less confusion is essential to Twitter’s business.

Cons: A Lack of Commenting

This efficiency and design though does come at a cost. That cost is the customization of retweets.
In the current iteration of the retweet feature, you will be unable to comment. This is a big problem for many heavy sharers. We like to provide context and commentary on what we are sharing, especially if it is a friend or a worthy cause that we are retweeting:

I don’t disagree with the assertion that we are killing part of the conversation. But that doesn’t mean that Twitter won’t implement commenting in future iterations. It also means that retweets will be cleaner, as there was no standard for commentary either.

The Reality: The Current System Is Broken
While most readers probably retweet on a regular basis, the truth is that very few people retweet currently. This is a subject discussed in-depth with Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone.

The plan is to get the [retweeting feature] launched, learn from user engagement, and iterate as necessary. This is something most smart social media companies do with feature launches.
Twitter hopes that Project Retweet will vastly increase retweeting and resharing, because it’s actually a small percentage of users that retweet currently.

While Dan Zarrella and other heavy retweeters have legitimate issues with the new retweeting system, this feature isn’t being built for them. It’s being built for the new user who gets turned off by all the confusion and by the casual user that benefits from a simpler and more streamlined retweeting option.

Twitter is better off if more people retweet, and Twitter is better off with more users being engaged. The new retweeting system fixes both of these problems. It will take several iterations until Twitter gets Project Retweet exactly right, but it was right to do something about the current retweeting system. It will make Twitter a richer and more engaging experience for its millions of users.

Web-based phone service JAJAH has just released their Twitter calling feature JAJAH@Call in beta, giving participating members the ability to call each other, free of charge, by way of Twitter.

The calling service works when a member tweets “@call @twittername.” The tweet will cause both phones to ring, and the Twitterers will be connected without the service sharing either telephone number.

JAJAH@Call also works independent of the platform you use, so whether you use the web, a destkop client, or a mobile application when tweeting, the tweet-to-call service should work without hiccup.

Though pretty unique, JAJAH@Call has some interesting conditions associated with the service, none more interesting than the 2 minute talk time limitation, which the company considers the verbal equivalent of a tweet. Also, in order to work, both parties — caller and recipient — need to be members of the JAJAH@Call service.

We’re quite intrigued by the voice-over-Twitter idea, though we do think it could create funky situations where you receive phone calls from Twitterers you don’t really want to talk to. In some instances, this could be a great way to immediately contact someone you need to reach on a pressing matter, but in others, it could turn into a big if not awkward distraction.

We can just envision the uncomfortable greetings now. Hello, I’m so and so, and I follow you on Twitter, my Twitter name is XXXX. Do you want to go out on a date sometime? Or, say for instance, you’re in the middle of a sentence and reach the 2 minute limit and you’re both cut off from each other. One saving grace is that calls can only be made to people who follow you, which means should a particular caller annoy you, you can unfollow them on Twitter to prevent future voice communication.

We have to give it to JAJAH for pushing the Twitter envelope and are looking forward to giving the service a try. Let us know your take on voice-over-Twitter in the comments.

You’re probably familiar with Google AdSense and AdWords, Google’s flagship advertising products. It’s how Google makes its billion of dollars. Highly targeted text ads appear on Google search and third party websites that are part of the AdSense program. Advertisers buy ads based on keywords, with more popular keywords costing more per click than less popular terms.

This has only applied to text ads though, not banner or display ads. But speculation was rampant that Google would apply its unique and lucrative ad model to display ads after its $3.1 Billion DoubleClick acquisition.

Now that speculation has become reality. Google has just launched the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and it is just like AdWords and AdSense, except that it is a marketplace for display ads.

First, here is what Google said in its announcement:

“We’ve been working hard to put these principles into practice, and today we’re excited to announce the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.

These publishers and ad networks manage and represent large volumes of ads and ad space from lots of advertisers and websites. By bringing them together in an open marketplace in which prices are set in a real-time auction, the Ad Exchange enables display ads and ad space to be allocated much more efficiently. This improves returns for advertisers and enables publishers to get the most value out of their online content.”

Essentially, the small-time advertiser or business can now buy targeted display ads on thousands of DoubleClick ad-serving websites. This could have some major repercussions on the entire web. Some possibilities:

- It could significantly increase revenue for Google, as a highly targeted ad marketplace means people are paying more for the ads they want to serve.

- It increases Google’s competition with Yahoo, the current leader in display advertising.

- Highly targeted ad campaigns could effectively reach everywhere. This could be a major boon to marketers.

If you want to learn more, Google has a PDF explaining the Ad Exchange, as well as a video overview:

Twitter has been making a series of big announcements outlining changes to the microblogging service such as geolocation tweets and Project Retweet. But quietly Twitter has been making some subtle interface changes too.

A few days ago, some of our readers noticed some font changes to Twitter pages. But two changes that seem to have rolled out today also piqued our interest. First, there is now a new “Follow Bar” which provides a cleaner interface for following, replying, or blocking specific Twitter users. Secondly, the horrendous and ugly default avatar of old has been replaced by a variety of multicolored Twitter birds.

In case you need a refresher, here is the old avatar, which you would have had on your profile until you uploaded a picture. Remember the weird brown smiley face?

Stare into its creepy blue eyes, and you might suddenly find your soul missing. Yes, that’s how ugly it is.

Now, here is the new, updated default avatar for Twitter profiles:

So you may notice that they not only updated the avatar, but they also changed the follow bar. It extends across the page, has hover text, and is just all kinds of win. You’ll also notice that the avatar above is different than the one at the very top of this article. Different people have different avatar colors – orange, blue, green, and others have all been sighted.

It looks like that their slew of new hires are paying dividends, especially Twitter’s Creative Director Doug Bowman, formerly Google’s visual design leader.

We’re glad that the old avatar is going the way of the dinosaur. Almost anything was better than that thing.

Is reading online news broken? Google seems to think so as they just launched Google Fast Flip, a Google Labs experiment that’s designed to help you flip through news online as fast as you would if you were holding a print magazine or paper.

Fast Flip is essentially just a funky way to flip through articles from three dozen Google partners including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Fast Company. Partners share in advertising revenue generated through the labs experiment.

With Fast Flip you can flip through snapshots of the day’s popular news, drill into specific sections and topics, or narrow stories by publisher source. Once you select a story, you can view the article in its totality and use the arrows to flip to the previous or next story.

Fast Flip comes with additional features like the ability to share stories via email, story liking, dynamic content based on your viewing experience, and mobile-friendly versions.

According to Google’s post on the launch, the point is to replicate the magazine or print reading experience and make browsing stories faster. The company writes:

“Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting.”

On first look, Fast Flip feels like a bit flop. While certainly unique, it’s likely to appeal to a very small segment of online news consumers. Sure, the online news reading experience could be improved, but Fast Flip is more of a tangential approach than it is a step in a revolutionary direction.

What’s your take on Fast Flip? Share your thoughts in the comments.

At this point it’s already the stuff of legend. In geek circles, the Apple Tablet is more coveted, more sought after, and more mysterious than Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and the jackalope combined.

One thing that seems increasingly clear is the market has been dancing around the question, “what is the perfect computing form factor between smartphone and full notebook?” for some time. The unexpectedly popular netbook craze is one answer to that. I think Apple’s tablet will be another.

Moreover, I think the Apple Tablet will be disruptive to the still formative eReader and digital publishing industry. Amazon is the current forerunner there, with the popular Kindle taking the lead over earlier player Sony and smaller companies like iRex, FoxIt and Bookeen. They’re already sitting right on top of a pile of published works to distribute, and right now their vertical strategy is almost the only game in town.

But it won’t be for long. And there are some major corners of the publishing industry who haven’t quite chosen sides yet: newspapers and magazines. Some in those camps are flirting with the forthcoming Plastic Logic Reader, and others are poking at the idea of developing their own hardware devices and trying to build their own vertical markets for content.

In other words, the time is right — for Apple to swoop in and steal the show the way they did when the music industry was struggling to find the answers to how to go digital gracefully. Let’s take a look at why an Apple Tablet would not only be a timely device, but could be poised to be a powerful player in the shift to digital publishing.

It Won’t Be a One-Trick Pony

There’s both an upside and a downside to single-function devices. The upside is they do exactly what some sizable niche market wants and they do it better than almost anything else out there. The downside is they appeal to sizable niche markets, and risk being subsumed by multi-function devices sooner or later.

Case in point: your phone. You can’t buy a mobile phone that’s just a phone anymore. Well — you can, but you have to reach for it. Not so long ago MP3 players and portable video players were separate devices — now you’re hard-pressed to find a media player that doesn’t do both… and for that matter, isn’t also a phone.

Portable gaming devices have cameras (so you can send photos to Facebook, of course), still cameras shoot video (as do media players, which could unseat single-function devices like the Flip Mino…), heck — even printers have app stores these days. Steve Jobs even alluded to this himself in a recent interview with David Pogue: “I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing. But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”

It Will Be in Color

Let’s face it, one of the biggest limitations of e-ink is that displays are currently only monochrome, except for the Fujitsu Flepia that is only being sold (expensively) in Japan. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has gone on record stating that a color Kindle would be “multiple years away” because of the progress (or lack thereof) being made in laboratory prototypes.

Other companies have color e-ink products in the works, but even they don’t see any mass production before the end of next year at the earliest. And even when we get there, e-ink technology faces unmatchable competition from the existing technologies of LCD and OLED in the visual quality afforded by the contrast ratio department. The best a color eReader can hope for currently is about 20 to 1 contrast ratio, with LCD typically measured in the thousands to 1 range and OLED in the tens of thousands to 1.

For all of these reasons, we see every opportunity for someone like Apple to swoop in and upend the digital print content market with an awesome tablet device married to the great content delivery engine it already has with the iTunes Store. And most importantly it won’t be just books — it will be graphic novels and newspapers (with ads!) and slick, glossy magazines (with ads!).

Once you start thinking about all the places a “magazine” can go once it gets on an interactive device with an internet connection, you can imagine publishers starting to find a digital ocean they can finally swim in. One could argue they have that ocean already, but think about how multi-touch on a device you can hold in the hand offers something distinctive from mouse, keyboard and monitor land.

And what is iTunes LP if not a stepping stone to a great multimedia content delivery engine? With iTunes 9, Apple is already selling digital books (warning: iTunes link).

It Will Be Multi-touch

We touched on this already in the last section (pun intended!): the secret’s in the interface. We’ve been trundling along with mouse, keyboard and monitor as the primary computing interface for a dang long time at this point. The tablet PC was at least successful enough to stick around, but it didn’t exactly revolutionize the computing world after the form factor’s introduction in 2001. And only recently did they start supporting Multi-touch input.

To what device do we owe the relatively newfound popularity of multi-touch? That’s right. That one. It turns out that multi-touch is an intuitive way to interact with a lot of different objects, because human beings are so attuned — perhaps even evolved — to using our fingers to perform these kinds of gestures. It feels so natural because it is natural.

Apple has already brought Multi-touch to the trackpad of its MacBook Pro laptop line. The next logical step is to bring that interface to a larger, tablet-style computing device that doesn’t have to be quite as portable as a mobile phone, but will be held in the hands nonetheless.

It Will Be Sexier

Don’t get me wrong, the Kindle isn’t an eyesore or anything. It’s just a bit, shall we say, utilitarian in some respects. There’s markedly more suave in evidence in the Kindle 2 versus the original (see the comparison below with the original Kindle on the left). And yet, it still falls on the geekier side of the spectrum.

One thing that limits the Kindle’s sex appeal? Its keyboard. With the iPhone, Apple has already proven that a digital device doesn’t need to waste lots of screen real estate with all those keys. Of course, there are still those in the hardcore QWERTY camp out there, and we don’t see the physical keyboard disappearing from all computing devices anytime soon.

However, there is one conspicuously suitable form factor for a keyboard-less computer: a tablet. Give it one big juicy screen and a virtual keyboard, take down the Apple Store for a few minutes, and listen for the sound of thousands of early adopters reaching for their wallets. And once those early adopters bring that thing home for the holidays, fuggedaboutit. Everyone will have to have one. And they won’t even entirely know why.

What do you think — Apple Tablet: inevitable fact, or wishful fiction? Will Jobs and company go after the digital publishing market, despite protesting too much? Will you be untempted by an iSlab, or have you already been practicing your credit card quickdraw for the next Apple event?

Yesterday, Twitter expanded its Terms of Service, turning it into a 15 section document that encompasses everything from spam to tweet ownership. However, the addition that’s getting the most buzz is advertising.

Twitter has yet to turn on any major revenue stream, despite being in business since 2006. However, Twitter opened the door to the possibility of advertising in both its TOS and a blog post announcing the changes. This could be a significant profit machine for the microblogging company, but it could also cause user dissatisfaction or even revolt.

If Twitter decides to turn on the ad machine, how will users react? We’re interested in the possibility, so we’ve decided to explore the potential ramifications. More importantly though, we want your vote on whether you would be fine with ads on Twitter.

Ads on Twitter: The Possibilities

Not all ad formats are made equal, and because of this, not all user reactions are equal, either. There is a difference between a giant pop-up banner ad and a less intrusive sponsored tweet.

Some of the advertising possibilities:

1. Sponsored Tweets: A lot like Digg Ads, these tweets would appear in your stream (likely in a different-colored box) with a text-based advertisement and a link.

2. On-Page Ads: This would be akin to a Google Adsense ad on a web page or a banner ad. If you visit the Twitter homepage actually, you’ll see something similar – the Twitter definitions. There are areas to place ad spots. How users would take it is another story.

3. Mobile Ads: There is often extra character space at the end of Twitter text messages. Adding a small sponsored ad to the end could be lucrative but considered intrusive.

There are plenty of possibilities, some more innovative than others, but the end result would still be advertisers paying for space somewhere on Twitter.

Twitter has to make money to survive, but the introduction of any ad format will generate drama and attention. The more intrusive, the more anger. If you cannot opt out of the ads, it could generate more backlash. If it just appears without an announcement, it raises the same problem.

However, we think that Twitter has learned from the blunders of other companies and understands that if it is to introduce a new ad format, it has to be up-front about it and the format has to be novel.

Your Opinion

We want to know what you think, though. Would ads on Twitter ruin the experience, or would you tolerate them so that Twitter can expand and add more features (and more servers)?

With Twitter growing so dramatically and in so many directions over the last few months, it’s probably no surprise that they have decided to expand their Terms of Service – the core rules that govern the use of Twitter. The company announced the changes today in a detailed blog post.

The new TOS, which is far more expansive and specific than the old one, not only addresses privacy concerns, but ownership, spam, rights, and links. The microblogging company said that, now that they better understand how users utilize Twitter, they can update the TOS to match.

While there are many changes, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone highlighted four key areas in where they updated the TOS:

“Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

APIs—The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We’re also working on guidelines for use of the API.

SPAM—Abusive behavior and spam is also outlined in these terms according to the rules we’ve been operating under for some time.”

The new TOS has 15 sections which better encompasses potential issues on Twitter like privacy and ownership. This change, as well as the announcement, was probably a necessary move to avoid the Facebook Terms of Service fiasco that occurred back in February.

The two things that strike us though are the discussion of ads and that you own your tweets. This TOS seems to be a starting point for adding advertising to the Twitter platform. At the very least, it clearly says the option is open. It is a major potential source of revenue, after all.

On tweet ownership: we’re glad to hear that they are ours. We worked hard to make all of those witty 140 character remarks, after all.

Much of the content on this blog involves information on marketing your site through social media and social networking sites. However, maybe you want to create your own networking site to fill an existing void or rather than using some of those that already exist. If you are interested in building a networking site, you could of course have the site built from scratch, or you could use some type of existing platform to handle the back end of the site.

In this post we’ll look at 9 options for creating your own social network. Some are free options, and others are paid options that may be more appealing depending on your situation.

Ning

With Ning you can create your own social network very quickly for free. If you’re serious about building the site into something significant you can upgrade to a paid version with more features.

BuddyPress

For WordPress users, BuddyPress may be an attractive option. With BuddyPress you can turn a WordPress MU installation into a social networking site.

Pligg

Pligg is a common choice (open source) for social news sites, such as Sphinn and Design Float. Pligg gets criticized frequently for the poor security at Design Float, but the site doesn’t show any signs of being actively managed, so it’s hard to blame Pligg for that.

KickApps

KickApps is a paid option that will allow you to build a social network with a lot of features. Pricing starts at $39.95 per month for the smallest plan.

CrowdVine

CrowdVine allows you to create a simple networking site for your group or organization. There are both free and paid options available.

CollectiveX

CollectiveX will allow you to create a social site for your group, organization or association. There are several different packages available including a free plan. Paid plans start at $9 per month and there are several premium features that you can add on for an additional fee.

Drupal

Drupal is a popular open source content management system that can be used to create social networking and social media sites. Design Bump, a social news site for the design community, is built on Drupal. There are a number of modules that can be used for building a social networking site with Drupal, here is a list.

Elgg

Elgg is an open source option that was created specifically to power social networking sites.

Dolphin

Dolphin is another free, open source option. It includes features like photo sharing and video sharing, among others.

If the Newspaper Association of America and Google were to display their relationship on Facebook, the description would read “It’s complicated.” As newspaper revenues continue to tank, the NAA has stepped up its sort of passive-aggressive lashing out at the search giant for, well, essentially being more effective at monetizing the distribution of its content than they are.

In a twist that’s probably a surprise to almost no one, the potential suitor for saving the newspapers from the bugaboo of Google might well be… Google. The company submitted a document indicating it is in the process of building a sophisticated micropayments system based on Google Checkout that would allow publishers to charge for individual pieces or bundles of content.

It’s clear that the system is still only in the very early planning stages at this point, but Google says in the document it expects the new payment structure to be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year.” That sounds like the micropayment system will be fast-tracked to deliver reportedly “extremely simple” merchant integration and a solution to the major problem of transaction costs that currently inhibits micropayment plans from being implemented widely on the web.

Google Micropayments: An iTunes-like Model?

We’ll give you one guess whose playbook Google plans to borrow from on the business model side of things: Apple’s App Store (1.8 billion downloads can’t be wrong, it seems). In a brief paragraph Google discusses a similar revenue share to the iTunes model as well as its own Android Market, which both take a 30% cut of the total revenue and pay out 70% to the developer (or in this case, publisher).

Still, they make sure to include a cautionary warning about the pipe dream notion that suddenly charging for content on the web is the solution to newspapers’ woes: “We do not believe it will be the norm for accessing content.”

Check out the full document Google submitted to the NAA below. Let us know in the comments: what would it take for you to spend money for online content? What kind of payment packages might make sense in a brave new world of micropayments? Or will ducking back inside the paywall only hasten print news’s demise?

Google’s proposal to the Newspaper Association of America

Users of WordPress hosted blogs (WordPress.com) received a new spell checking tool today, by way of parent company Automattic’s acquisition of After the Deadline, a tool that is “so much better than other checkers I’d used,” says Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg.

The features of After the Deadline – and now WordPress – are explained well in the video below, but like other recent Automattic acquisitions (PollDaddy, IntenseDebate, Gravatar), this seems to be all about taking a third-party blogging tool and giving it the scale to become far better than it could be on its own.

In the case of After the Deadline, this means “the technology is learning from millions of blog posts on WP.com to make the contextual parts of the checker smarter and smarter,” says Mullenweg. In other words, now that it’s part of every WordPress blog, After the Deadline is going to get much smarter, much faster, which should be good for everyone that uses it. That includes self-hosted WordPress blogs (WordPress.org) too, which can get After the Deadline by installing this plugin.

Google Wave arrives on September 30th. On that day, Google will start sending out 100,000 invites to non-developers to its much-anticipated real-time communication platform.

It’s not even released and it’s generating more hype than almost any other web product in recent memory. The reason stems from its game-changing features and their potential applications on business, education, customer service, email, social networking, and more.

So with Wave on the way, we wanted to explore some of the potential of Google’s upcoming product. We have a few of our own ideas and included some from Google Wave developers, but more than anything, we want your ideas, so be sure to leave your great Google Wave invention in the comments! Who knows, maybe we’ll feature them in the future!

1. Wave-Powered Forums

This idea’s actually been in my head before, but it’s articulated with some depth by Andrew Camel in the Google Wave API Google Group:

“So I thought that it would be an awesome feature of google wave to have it power a forum. Each thread, instead of being multiple different posts, it would just be a google wave. So, instead of having to try a discussion by posting and going back to the page and checking for new replies and while you were posting, you missed a new part of the discussion, you can post like you are having an instant-message session and you can also save the posts like forum threads. I really think that this would be a great use of the google wave api.”

Real-time threads? Saving waves like forum threads? Google Wave?! Sign us up!

2. Wave-powered Commenting System

“One possibility: Google Wave Embeds may be a real-time replacement to static comments. If Google perfects wave embeds, you could even see YouTube.com comments replaced with waves, although it is way too early to make any calls on the potential of this.”

Now that we’ve had some time to play with Wave, we think more than ever that Wave as a commenting system is a real possibility. Each blog post or YouTube video could have a new wave, where users could converse about practically anything in real-time. Anybody who comes in late can just play back the wave and get up to speed. It could be a whole new era for commenting.

3. Wave-Based Content Management System

A thread in the API group discusses the possibility of using Wave as a project management system. I’ll be honest – even I’ve been toying with this idea. Here’s what Jason Salas said in the thread:

I think that maybe many of the major CMS vendors will create extensions (if we don’t do it ourselves) to integrate their products with Wave. That’s what I’m working on now. But that is a neat idea to actually use Wave as its own CMS platform, with assumed features
like document creation/management, scheduling, RSS feeds, (micro) blogging, archival/search, etc.”

Can’t you see it?

4. Wave for Customer Support

This idea actually comes from a thread in the Google Wave development preview titled “What Will You Use it For?” It’s a remarkable discussion and brainstorming session over the potential of wave. One of the most fleshed-out ideas in the thread, though, is Wave for customer support. Here are some of the bullet-points for how Wave could be used in customer support:

- Sending trouble tickets
- Incident tracking can be a wave
- Call center analytics gadget
- Distribution list gadget
- Customer meta-data gadget
- Surveys can be a wave

Real-time customer support? Yeah, someone please build that.

5. Wave for Education

Google is giving some schools and businesses an early look at Google Wave. But why? What could Wave possibly accomplish in the realm of education and business? A lot, we firmly believe.

I refer once again to the “What Will You Use it For?” Wave in the dev preview for some ideas for how Wave can be used in education.

- Building a more interactive / creative learning environment
- Proofreading / writing papers
-Brainstorming potential project ideas
- Interactive tutoring from home
- Collaborative Environment for Cyber Schooling

With more widgets, you could embed streams and communicate with professors in real-time. We’re excited about Wave’s potential to transform education.

What Are Your Ideas?

We’ve highlighted some of our ideas and many ideas from enthusiasts across the web. So now it’s your turn. What is your idea for Google Wave? We want to hear your thoughts and your opinions in the comments.

Oh, and if you need a little inspiration for your idea, be sure to check out our comprehensive Google Wave coverage:

Twitter is good for a great many things, from sharing music to building your brand, from finding friends to playing games. But while we know all about what Twitter is good for, is it possible to actually do good on Twitter? How do you do it? As it turns out, there are many ways to help out others just by tweeting.

We’ve collected some of our favorites in the round up below. If you know of any other ways to do good on Twitter, please share them in the comments!

1. Follow Charities

Probably the simplest way to start doing good on Twitter, is to follow the Twitter accounts of your favorite charities. Charities use Twitter to spread information about their causes and campaigns, and you can stay connected to those issues by following them. For non-profit organizations, Twitter is an amazing way to reach constituents and you can help them extend their reach by retweeting the things that they tweet out to your network.

The Summer of Social Good campaign may have recently come to a close, but you can still support the charities involved by following them on Twitter – Oxfam America, The Humane Society, LIVESTRONG, and WWF. There are also many other charities on Twitter, so follow your favorites and retweet their information.

2. Participate in Twitter Fund Drives

Twitter has proven to be an incredible way to raise money. Because information has the potential to spread so quickly, news of a fundraising drive can reach millions of people through retweets in a relatively short amount of time. As a result, Twitter becomes a great vehicle for encouraging people to donate to a cause, and a number of highly successful fundraising events have been held over Twitter.

The most well-know is probably Twestival, a collection of Twitter-organized festivals held all over the world last February that raised over $250,000 for charity: water.

But Twestival isn’t the only Twitter fundraising success story. Last November, Tweetsgiving raised over $11,000 to build a new classroom for a school in Tanzania, and 12for12k, an organization trying to raise $12,000 each for 12 charities over 12 months, has held a number of Twitter-based fundraisers. Perhaps the most successful Twitter fundraising campaign, was the one earlier this year that raised nearly a million dollars to help pay for a heart transplant for Eric De La Cruz, the brother of a CNN Internet correspondent. (Unfortunately, Eric died on July 4th of his rare heart condition, severe dilated cardiomyopathy.)

Twitter fundraising events are happening all the time, so keep your eyes open and be on the lookout for trending hashtags corresponding to a fundraising event. One currently running Twitter fundraising campaign is 140 Smiles by Operation Smile, an organization that raises money to provide children with cleft lips or palates with life-altering facial surgery, and is attempting to raise money for 140 such operations.

3. Help Someone Find a Job

Twitter is a great way to find a job, but in the current tough global economy, those without work need all the help they can get finding work. And that’s the idea behind @JobAngels. It works like this: those in need of work, throw out a tweet using the hashtag #JobAngels, then others help those people find jobs.

To get started, just do a search for #jobangels or follow the Job Angels account to find those looking for work. If you know of a job that fits their need, tweet it out to them.

4. #BlameDrewsCancer

When social media guru Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, he didn’t roll over and complain, “Why me?” Instead, he did something radical. He launched Blame Drew’s Cancer, a Twitter campaign helping people blow off steam, beat up on cancer, and raise money for charity in the process.

The idea is simple. Whenever something goes wrong in your life, you simply blame Drew’s cancer by tweeting using the hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. His sponsor, 23andme is donating $1 to LIVESTRONG for everything that’s blamed on his cancer (over 24,000 things so far!).

Drew is also holding a 24-hour Blame-a-thon on 09/09/09.

5. Give Twollars to Charity

Twollars is a really interesting way to pledge money to charity using Twitter. Essentially, Twollars are a Twitter-based currency with no hard money value. Users start with 50 Twollars and can give them to each other or to charities via Twitter. Twollars are worth nothing until someone buys them (at a rate of 10 Twollars per US$1). I know what you’re thinking: why would anyone buy something that’s worth nothing?

The reason is all about awareness. Twollars can only be redeemed for cash by charities, so businesses that buy Twollars are actually making donations to charities (for which they receive awareness) and users donating Twollars are really spreading awareness of that charity’s good work. By donating Twollars to the American Red Cross, for example, you’re actually saying, “I like what the Red Cross does, and I vote for some business to donate money to them.”

6. Start or Sign a Petition

One of the best ways to organize and raise awareness about an issue, is to start and sign a petition. Twitter has made it absolutely dead simple to create and spread petitions by combining both the means of signing and the means of spreading the word into the same action: the retweet.

There are many Twitter petition platforms out there, and each works a bit differently. One of the best is Act.ly, which is now also a platform for organizing tweetups.

BONUS: Organize a Tweetup

Which brings us to our final point. A tweetup is an offline meeting organized via Twitter, and they’re an incredible way to gather like-minded people and raise awareness for a cause, issue, or charitable organization. By bringing people together offline, you can make the issue at hand more real and get people more actively involved.

In what other ways can you use Twitter for good? Let us know in the comments.

Exactly one year ago today, the Google Chrome browser was launched to the world. And, in Google-like fashion, they took the unconventional route of announcing Chrome via comic book. Do you remember all of the discussion around Google’s decision to enter the browser market?

Now, 365 days later, Google is commemorating Chrome’s first birthday with some impressive stats. To get the full picture of where Chrome stands today though, we need to look at all the numbers.

The Chrome Road Ahead

While Google’s commemorative blog post talks a great deal about birthday cakes and birthday balloons, the numbers-oriented company did reveal a plethora of interesting facts about the browser. Here is what Google shared:

“Since September 2, 2008, there have been:

– 51 developer releases, 21 beta releases or updates, and 15 stable releases or updates
– Over 20,600 bugs filed (4367 of them were duplicates, 3505 have been fixed, which leaves a whole lot left to go!)
– 11 external committers and bug editors, 46 external code contributors
– 50 Chrome Experiments
– 26 posts on the Google Chrome blog
– 12 Chrome Shorts, a collection of short films about Google Chrome
– A sequel to the comic in Japanese

More importantly, we’ve improved by over 150% on Javascript performance since our initial beta.”

Those numbers are impressive, but they’re almost entirely development-related. The stat that industry analysts, media, and early adopters care about though, is market share. So in 12 months, how much ground has Google made?

The answer: not much. According to stats from Market Share/Net Applications, Chrome only has 2.84% of the market, far behind Internet Explorer’s 66.87% or Firefox’s 22.98%.

Still, it’s only had a year, and it isn’t even officially out for Mac yet (disappointingly). And big developments, like the the Google/Sony deal to pre-load Chrome on Sony PCs are going to boost its market share.

More time is needed before we know whether Chrome was a smart project or a failed endeavor. Will Google push Chrome even harder as it fixes the bugs and makes it into a viable browsing alternative? Or will Google lose focus as it builds the related Google Chrome OS? Only time will tell.