Social Wave is not your typical online social network where you can join circles of virtual friends and talk about common interests with people that you'll most likely never meet. We have nothing against those kind of social networks. We actually enjoy them a lot when we're not running Social Wave, but we recognize that the social networking alternatives that are locally based and grounded in the neighborhoods that we live in are few and far in between. Social Wave was created to help fill that void and here are the ways it can help you connect with your community.

Social Events and Community Events

The Social Wave events calendar is entirely member driven. It allows you to share events that interest you with your community and if you want to meet people at an event or host a get together, you can create a "Social Event" that allows people to rsvp to attend with you. Go ahead, post a happy hour gathering and see who shows up or try to get people together to watch the hockey game at a neighborhood pub.

Member Profiles

Every Social Wave member can create a detailed member profile to introduce him or herself to the community. You can look through other people's member profiles by browsing through the members list, clicking on tagged words in people's member profiles to lookup everyone who mentioned "volleyball" or "board games" as one of their interests, or browsing through the membership of Social Wave Groups.

Discussion Forums

Do you have an issue, a concern, or just a topic of interest that you'd like to talk about with other locals? Post it in the discussion forums and get a conversation going. We have forums for general interest topics, neighborhood and city regions, and for special interest subject matter. If you don't see your neighborhood or interests listed in our forums, you can ask us to create a new category for you or start a Social Wave Group and create a new forum that you can help lead.

Social Wave Groups

Social Wave Groups are more than just an alternative to other online group applicaitons like Yahoo Groups. We provide a similar kind of online service as those groups do, but we go beyond what you'll get elsewhere because we want to help you build your group. We'll give you pointers, supply you with Social Wave cards you can hand out, and do what we can to help spread the word about your group.

In some cases we've even built parallel websites for groups to give those groups a website they can use to present themselves to the general public that feeds off of content they post to Social Wave. See downtowncampbell.com and downtownwillowglen.org for examples.

Reviews and Opinions

We're definitely not Yelp or CitySearch and our goal isn't to have every business possible listed in our reviews directory (though we wouldn't mind if we could). Our goal is to give you a place to share your experiences with a more focused and locally based set of people. A lot of good information can be exchanged this way and you can get to know people in the process.

You can also start your own reviews forum for a very specific interest of yours and have it published through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) for other sites to pick up. Leave us a message below and we'll tell you how. 

Discover Locally Owned Businesses

Social Wave actively works with owners of small locally owned businesses to help them gain exposure in the communities that they're located in. One of the ways we do this is through our Merchant Profiles service, a free way for small businesses to get online exposure.

• Merchant Profiles: Overview of Social Wave Merchant Profiles
• Groups: Resources Available to Social Wave Group Leaders
• Social Wave Manifesto
• Social Wave Newsletters