Social media is becoming the corner stone of the web, evolving every day and challenging the search engines at their own game.

People no longer only use search engines to find products and services. They listen to Twitter, browse Facebook, check out online reviews and surf on their mobile phones.

Up until now I have tried, but just have not got into all things Twitterish and therefore I fall into the lazy group of people.

For more information about what Twitter is, visit this blog post on “Talking About Twitter“.

Basically, Google Wave is an email client with messenger capabilities and an added photo sharing with blog update-ability. Now Wave is of course mobile friendly and as a result I can see it doing away with the need to use both Twitter and Facebook. I welcome Wave with open arms if I can dump Twitter, Facebook, Messenger and other less important programs in favour of Google Wave.

It has been 2.5 months since my last post about Google Wave, so I can only image that it must be right around the corner. Over the past 2.5 months a selection of people (10,000) have been testing a Beta version (officially referred to as the Google Wave Sandbox) of Google Wave to iron out bugs and add new features as these beta people see fit and as Google sees worthy. On September 30th, Google Wave will be rolled out to 100,000 members of the general public in what will most likely be the official Beta Release of Google Wave.

Google Wave may also be doing away with programs such as Microsoft Word and will no doubt incorporate similarities to Excel and powerpoint also. Documents, in the example above, can be edited by multiple parties at any one time, cutting down on editing times drastically as all is done in real time (seemingly from anywhere across the globe).

An instant translator tool and polling abilities just add to the fun. I just cannot wait for the release of Google Wave!

For those of you who haven’t heard of iGoogle – I hear most of my friends saying “iGoogle, what’s that?” – it is, as Google puts it:

… a way for people to quickly and easily personalize their Google experience with all the information on the web that was most useful to them.

iGoogle was launched in 2005 – a long way back – and although Google claims 10’s of millions of people use it, I am not so sure.

I have started using it more in the past year as I always find myself logged into Google, either using Google AdWords, Google Analytics or Google Reader. Therefore it has become useful for me in that I have added a to-do-list, the weather forecast, a procrastinator clock which keeps me on time by always being fast, a currency converter, world clocks for the countries where my family is located, some mountain bike videos and the World’s worst weather forecast.

In some ways it is more useful than facebook, however the recent addition of ‘Social Gadgets for iGoogle’, and the added ‘Chat’ feature seem less than spectacular.

To add friends to the chat feature, one must manually input email addresses separated by commas. This is less than ideal and I doubt that anyone will bother with it. I am tempted so that I can write something useful for this blog post, however I still cannot be bothered. I’ll use the chat feature when I can add friends with a feature by which iGoogle can access my hotmail, yahoo, gmail or even facebook account to see which friends are already using iGoogle and invite those automatically who aren’t.

Keep in mind though that iGoogle’s social network is only currently working if you are located in Australia, and slowly being launched in the US over the following week.

Let’s be honest though – there are only so many social networking gadgets that we can use, and keep up to date with. Facebook has proven to be extremely popular so I cannot see that all (or most, or even some) Facebook users are going to adopt iGoogle’s new social network. Perhaps a better idea would have been to integrate Facebook with iGoogle, if that is at all possible. I am sure it will be in the future. For now, I am bamboozled with choice and therefore I will use what I find the most convenient:

• Facebook for photo sharing and tagging, and a few games, plus some chatting and status updates, comments etc.
• Messenger for chat with friends or colleagues in more of a business sense.
• iGoogle for my to-do-list
• Google Accounts for access to Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Reader, Google Maps, Webmaster Tools, iGoogle
• and well that’s about it.

I am happy with this list and have so many friends already on Facebook that I am not in any hurry to change my social network to iGoogle. In fact, should iGoogle become any more congested I may drop using it as well.

For more information on iGoogle Social Gadgets watch the clip below or visit the blog post from Google on “I scream, you scream, we all scream for iGoogle social!”

So what is the big deal about online photo sharing? Find out more in the video below: