Continued from part 5: version control.
A social network platform has to be able to evolve with its users and with the communities it hosts. Twitter is for now the best example of how the platform – when it is malleable – evolves with its users. More complex platforms like Facebook and Ning are notoriously hard to change according to the preferences of their users.
Google Wave may have struck the right balance to make its entire platform customizable to a large extend. Google Wave offers free-text collaboration as Twitter does. Facebook and Ning have a more versatile data model that offer different kinds of functionality but at the same time creates content jails.

If you haven’t done so already, watch the 1:20 min announcement and demo of Google Wave. Wave is Google’s attempt at world domination and I welcome it.
I’ll write down my thoughts on the unique features of Google Wave in a few blog posts. I haven’t used Google Wave, in fact I’m basing myself on what’s available online today.
In this post I’ll talk about Wave’s underlying architecture based on what is known today. Architecture is probably the least accessible topic I intent to discuss yet Wave’s architecture is probably its most compelling feature. For me Wave’s architecture definitely deserves some closer inspection.
Wave has an associative memory architecture which is characterized by two important features: