Social Node

Steve Ballmer woke up thinking this was going to be a good day... For those of you wondering why Google hasn't been even more aggressive in its development of the already best-in-show Gmail platform via the integration of its diverse web app suite, the answer appears to lie in a forthcoming product called Google Wave , announced just an hour ago, that takes all-in-one, customizable webapp integration to the next level to consolidate all of your Google-based conversation, collaboration, gaming and geo-spatial interaction into discrete "waves" of information. In other words, rather than continuing to build onto a focused and already successful email product, potentially 1) overcomplicating it for certain users and 2) remaining stuck in an old product frame, Google Wave will sit atop apps like Gmail, Chat, Status Messages, Docs, Widgets, Friend Connect, Blogger, Calendar, Reader, Maps, Earth and perhaps even Facebook competitor Orkut, allowing you to mix the info flows...

Seriosity , a seriously cool company hard at work developing applications for the expanding serious games market, has begun making waves with its "Attent" email token app, thus opening the door to efficient new micropayment systems woven through increasingly popular webware. Wired: Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent's Outlook inbox. The early word is that assigning more tokens to more important messages truly does encourage recipients to digest them. Wired: When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem. Now, imagine if these tokens represented actual micropayments - small amounts of money or services IOUs - and were expanded to include replies...