You might be thinking, "What's with this site? It looks so Y2K!"
Please don't exaggerate. It only looks 2004-ish. That was when the last major upgrade of Social Wave was done.
In 2004, Friendster was the hot thing everyone was doing, MySpace wasn't a niche music network, and Facebook was still known as "thefacebook.comâ and had yet to expand beyond the college campus scene. It goes without saying that a lot has changed since that time.
Social Wave has evolved a lot since then too even if you can't really tell from its surface. I launched it in 2003 and by 2004 I could already tell that it wasn't going to go far as a location based community network that toned down social networking aspects and we started experimenting behind the scenes to use the system to help promote "Downtown typeâ business districts that featured community activities and a core of locally owned Mom and Pop businesses.
That ended up showing a lot of potential, but by the time we had a workable formula to work on, I was too involved in other work (the kind that actually pays the rent) to run with our new model. I always intended to get back to it soon. Rebuilding Social Wave has been a desire of mine for many years, but something was always in the way until a few months ago.
I've been quietly rebuilding the entire Social Wave system from the ground up for the past several months and it's only in the past week that I feel confident enough in the progress to say that a relaunch of an entirely new Social Wave is coming soon. If everything goes well, there should be a new system by early May. I'm hoping for late April, but that might be hoping for too much.
Those of you who still use Social Wave, the changes should all benefit you. Most of the "socialâ parts of the site are going away in favor of tighter integration with third party social media and networking services that weren't options for us ten years ago. Our goal is going to be to provide integrated tools that will help small businesses, community groups, non-profits, and event organizers promote themselves online more effectively and more easily. It'll take some time before all of our planned upgrades are fully rolled out, but as of our first release of Social Wave 2.0, you'll see a clear shift in direction.
Most of the content on the website will be ported over to the new system. We also plan on porting over all of the accounts too, but we don't know for sure yet.
Believe it or not, socialwave.net was once a pretty slick site. That it's survived long past its expiration date is a testament to its potential and here's to hopes that the second time's a charm.
