Google Wave and Portable Social Media

A quick observation about Google Wave.

I wrote some time ago about the problem of social media losing its social context as it moves around the digital universe. I thought some mechanism should be created to enable the social context pertaining to a unit of social media to be portable, so it moves along with it. It appears that Google Wave associates the people who pertain to a document (the authors, editors, people with access to view or edit the content, etc.) with the content in a portable way, through its "wavelets" concept.

It seems possible to share or transfer a piece of collaboratively authored content across the Wave system and into other systems with its social context intact. If so, this is a revolutionary step in the evolution of information technology. It gets my vote as the first technology I've seen that truly could be called Web 3.0, as far as I'm concerned.

It would only be right, if you downloaded a image from such a Wave based system to your pc, that it would somehow preserve the social context, perhaps with XML sidecar or embedded meta data, like the EXIF standard for photographs. The content could be uploaded back into a Wave ecosystem with its social context intact, possibly even after local edits.

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