.While in Montreal this weekend, coming in from the cold,warming up from icy temperatures outside, I found myself intently reading Howard Greenstein’s post on   Google Wave’s Massive Potential for Business Users and found it masterful (especially, tying the ideas of Daniel Levy on Group Dynamics of teams).

Howard made me want to run back to my hotel room and play with Google Wave (which I’ve been neglectful doing over the last two months I’ve had a Wave account), perhaps finding a way to tie Google Wave to Social Media and Web Analytics, but as I logged in to Wave, noticed quickly that there was no compelling reason  to use it (yet).

Plus, using Wave in  Firefox, crashed it (but a lot of applications crash Firefox).     Still, I myself thinking about critical mass and inflection points, that not enough people are using Google Wave, yet, but as  more people use  Wave – it will become  a dominant platform for communication and collaboration and transform our lives.

I think it makes a lot of sense that Google Wave has the capability to  unify every part of  a project, and all it’s modes of communications, under one grouping or unit (which can also be broken down in several ways with out losing it’s cohesiveness); and, I’m  wondering if Google Wave could be part of a larger answer, tying together strategy and  Social Media return on investment.

So how would Google Wave do anything for Analytics?

For one thing – there’s so much duplicated communication in email now – often so many virtual team members working on a project over different time zones, containing all of that work in one unit, called a Wave – is a marvelous thing – and if we have some kind of tracking mechanism we might be able to “optimize” Google Wave – perhaps Google Wave will have plug ins to tell us what the optimal resources for any Wave project … based on the activity taking place within that Wave; that might, in turn lead to staffing changes.

Another possibility for Analytics is tying different “silos” in companies together using Google Wave, in a new way – and Wave clearly isn’t there yet – but if we have data and sales information in different formats – all over the enterprise – and it’s difficult to assemble it now, it’s possible within a few years – Google Wave will become the “glue” that makes it much easier to pull all that “disparate” data into one view – and up to an executive level scorecard (see my post on Influencer Scorecard, The Chief Influencer Officer & the transmutation of Social Media and PR).

What about Social Media?

As there are often many efforts underway by a Brand at any moment – tying blogger relations, campaign management, online video management, event planning, marketing, etc, together could be done within Google Wave.    Perhaps the Social Media ROI debate that is likely to begin gelling in 2010 – will take place with Google Waves.

That’s one Google Wave, I want to surf.