There were a couple important new technology releases this week but the most significant for the small business owner is Google Wave. Why? This platform provides a powerful communication and collaboration tool you can use with internal and external stakeholders for FREE.

• Google Wave is about bringing together the Web 2.0 lifestyle to become a workstyle.
  Google’s apporach is significant because it will enter the workforce without having to go through IT management. This undercuts players like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP as it grows from the groundup –another groundswell like google docs and yammer.
• This also impacts Cisco, Webex and Webex connect who is also trying to try new delivery models to the enterprise.
• Existing smaller collaboration vendors and community platform vendors with enterprise focus will be part of the developer ecosystem and can extend their features to the Wave platform.
• Google is pushing real time collaboration, and traditional email is asynchronous, yet don’t expect everyone to be interacting in real time, all the time.
• This is a missed opportunity for LinkedIn who launched their platform but has not exploited as they’ve only hand selected a few partners.

Welcome gentle readers to the Memorial Day weekend version of {grow}. For the international crowd, this is a weekend we remember our service men and women and enjoy our family and friends at picnics and social events. And, of course, the Indy 500.

So, on a lighter note, here is a website you will enjoy like no other. I smiled — actually laughed out loud with delight — when I saw this music video that YOU control with your mouse. It might be the most relaxing five minutes you will spend this weekend! It’s lovely and wonderful. Enjoy!

http://bit.ly/HSRUp

It’s nearly 1 a.m. and I am glued to my computer watching the Twitter “tweets” from folks in California experiencing a 5.0 earthquake. By chance, I was online and saw a message come through that an earthquake was rattling Central L.A. I searched for the keyword and watched a steady stream of communication come through that expressed many human emotions — fear, relief and humor.

This is a significant event for two reasons. First, this is the first natural disaster since Twitter reached a critical mass of users in the last few months. Without the numbers supporting it, it could not have been an effective “personal broadcast channel.” I witnessed the power of in-the-moment communication through thousands of perspectives.

Second, because of the platform’s immediacy, eyewitness accounts of the quake were streaming out of the city before the traditional media could catch up. In fact, 12 minutes after the news was streaming out of L.A. on Twitter, there was still no post on the CNN website.

Yes, most of the communication I’m seeing is garbage … one fellow posted, “If Twitter is the future of news, and it’s 20,000 stories in 5 minutes saying “there was totally just an earthquake” … we’re in trouble.”

And there is a lot of humor, too. (“To minimize loss and damage in a quake, try not to own things.”) … probably because the natural disaster apparently is not too serious this time.

But woven through the OMG’s and LMAO’s was a compelling thread of humanity and an entirely new way to experience a current event. The next time there is a terrorist attack or crisis, many will “tune in” to Twitter for their news.

Twitter grew up tonight.

• Sharing your personal opinions, as well as expressing partisan political views, whether on Dow Jones sites or on the larger Web, could open us to criticism that we have biases and could make a reporter ineligible to cover topics in the future for Dow Jones.
• Consult your editor before “connecting” to or “friending” any reporting contacts.
• Let our coverage speak for itself, and don’t detail how an article was reported, written or edited.
• Don’t disparage the work of colleagues or competitors.
• Business and pleasure should not be mixed on services like Twitter … if you are in doubt about the appropriateness of a Tweet or posting, discuss it with your editor before sending.

• Should not engage in activities on the Internet which might bring the BBC into disrepute.
• Should not post derogatory or offensive comments on the Internet.
• Should be mindful of the information they disclose on social networking sites. Where they associate themselves with the Corporation (through providing work details or joining a BBC network) they should act in a manner which does not bring the BBC into disrepute.
• Cannot indicate where they are employed on their personal blogs.

Companies are not democracies and they have the right to employ people who do not want to cause them harm. Although the media companies were among the first to deploy strict guidelines on personal use of social media, the desire to maintain an untarnished reputation is no less important for other companies and we certainly see this practice become prevalent.

Missing from any of these published policies i– consequences. How far will companies go to reach into the public domain of free speech to protect their reputations? And what about disgruntled employees who have an axe to grind against an employer? Another prediction: Companies will begin offering monetary pay-outs to employees they dismiss, with the legal condition that they engage in no public communication to disparage the company.

I think we will soon see the first examples of companies punshing employees who violate these guidelines, setting the stage for new court cases examining the rights to free speech and the role of social media in our world.