Google Wave. A cool, new idea for Open Houses or Hot Sheets?

I should feel like a movie star because Google today rolled out the red carpet treatment to me and invited me to be a part of Google Wave. 

Google only invited 100,000 people to test it. Apparently I was important enough. An honor to be sure -- but I'm already on information overload already. I've barely mastered how to Chirp on Twitter, how to get fans coming to my FaceBook page and while I'm good at this... I by no means consider myself a Social Media Jedi Master yet.

I will play with Google Wave later in the week, and just this morning I already came up with a few ideas on how REALTORS can make use of Wave. 

Before I go further, you should know that Google's Wave is open source and allows you to create an open source, collaborative media bomblet container.  

What does that mean?

It means you have a product (that being Software as a Service) that allows you to communicate with prospects, friends, customers or family without the user having to understand much of many separate programs and services.

Google Wave is one part email, one part Twitter, one part Video (YouTube), one part Flickr, one Instant Messenger (like AOL or MSN) one part FaceBook and one part catapult. 

Catapult?  Yes, catapult. 

Remember the old Greek or Roman catapults?  Well, this is a lot like that. But instead of lobbing a huge rock at your opponent, you have a container that lets you lob a container of email, video, text, links, and whatever you want to drag and drop into it.

This container sits on the Internet somewhere (hosted by Google of course) and your friends, prospects of family can open up your media bomblet "container" and edit this (where you allow them with preferences) and you can forward part of my container (message or photos and attachments) and forward this onto another friend. 

As more friends or customers and prospects work with your Wave container, it adds your comments to it. And it can be instantly shared with others once you click save, so is sort of like Email, but more like Twitter micro-blog broadcasting like functionality.  Anybody can collaborate with you using your Wave container. 

If you're the owner of the Wave Container, you can add more people to it. You can add people in branches by adding people to your Wave container. If you have these people already saved in your Google address book, you just DRAG and drop this person into the WAVE container. 

I'm not really sure of how many gazillions of uses Wave will turn out to be, but one use I can see is for a LIVE Open House.

You have an open house. So you create a Wave container for the address and you can drag a few photos, videos, covenants and links to the local shopping malls, banks or schools and you can lob the Wave media container to your prospect. All of the people who wanted to SEE the open house can now see this Wave container. You can even save links to your Open House Containers to your REALTOR website (eventually). 

Open source and drag and drop functionality mean that you do not have to GO to your Blog, your email, your video website, etc.  You just drag these snippets and content into your Wave container and you refresh your Wave client. It looks good. Now you drag your recipients into the Wave Container and it auto sends them the links to your Wave container. 

What's most interesting about this technology is that it isn't new. More than 12 years ago, Apple Developed a drag and drop container like educational software called CyberDog.  The technology was very cool but Steve Jobs killed it when he returned to Apple as CEO in 1997.  OpenDoc technology was way ahead of its time and despite the fact that it attracted a few hundred developers (including me) Apple just didn't have enough money to keep OpenDoc alive.

The idea of open source collaboration is not new and it's nice seeing Google picking up CyberDog where Apple left off. 

Now the only question here is this:  IS Google's Wave going to infringe on any of Apple Computer's old patents on OpenDoc or CyberDog? 

We'll see. Stay tuned for more.