One thing that's becoming very evident to me is that waves have a much longer life expectancy and more individual identity than any other form of communication that I've used before. I think this has a lot of potential to disrupt the established form of the Web, in that it's just more useful to wrap content in a conversation than to let it sit and be read. Think Wikipedia, for example, where it's still edited via collaboration but where dialogue can happen around the edges, giving you some perspective into which pieces of an article are really controversial and get some perspective into why that is.

The lifespan of a message seems to have a big influence on its usefulness over time. IM's are on one end of the spectrum, with a lifespan of a few seconds, and are pretty useless after you close them. That's followed by tweets which are useful for probably a few hours, emails (a few days), blog posts (years) and wikis (years, but probably long forgotten and out of date).

Waves, I think would be somewhere in the years category, but more active than old blog posts and especially old wikis tend to be. They stick around for a while and evolve as people continue to join the wave's ad hoc social network and contribute, which brings past participants back to respond, which keeps the whole thing going indefinitely. It's a pretty cool thing to watch happen, actually. My last blog post was posted both to my blog and to Wave, and the Wave has certainly had a lot more participation, I think because it's much more democratic than a blog post. There is really no owner of a public Wave.

I can easily envision a scenario where a particular Wave that's been going on for years (UI issues aside--they will be fixed) would have its own Web site and be seen as more of a social network than a single wave.

The more I use this thing the more possibilities I see. I still have seen nothing to sway me from the belief that this is the next big sea change on the Net.

Thoughts? Interested to hear others' take on this and where Waves will fit in.