Social Media's Accidental Usefulness

So Evan and I have had an ongoing discussion about what we can do with Google Wave, now that we both have it. The suggested uses are document collaboration and event planning. This spawned a thread of the discussion that most of us use Facebook for event planning, even though that's not why we joined it. We all joined because everyone was doing it and it was a way to keep in touch with friends and share photos (another purported use for Wave) and play stupid games with each other. And then it turns out to be a fairly useful event planning tool (and a much more user-friendly one than MySpace).

Or look at Twitter, people get on because it's trendy, you get to talk about yourself, it works with your cell phone, etc, etc, etc. All of this is pretty vapid and meaningless, but Twitter has become a way to get news quickly. Remember when Captain Sully landed a plane in the Hudson river all those months ago? Twitter broke the story well before any of the news outlets.

So you have things like Facebook and Twitter which are, on their... ahem... faces, pretty shallow, but turn out to be real tools with real uses in the real world. But if you had started a service like Twitter with the idea of getting news to people quickly, nobody would care. If you started Facebook as the ultimate event-planning app, no one would go for it, and apps like these are only useful if you have lots and lots of people using them.

So if we want to get Wave off the ground, we need to come up with some piddly, insignificant shit that it can do that will attract users. Then you can actually start using it as a tool.

Any ideas?

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