Watching the Google Wave demo was so exciting. You can't watch the Wave collaborative editing architecture demo without thinking mobile.
RIM had the chance to be the social networking platform of choice if they had only forgone the FaceBook and MySpace clients and built those capabilities directly into the native inbox. But they don't seem to get that and instead will be relegated to an email and text service niche. That is by no means a bad business but it leaves Android a wide open field to capture the social address book, or social graph, construct on mobile. With Wave Google has taken that opportunity and raised the bar for all. Android will be the mobile social address book platform.
Why Android? Because it's open source, because it's not a legacy OS laden with all years of version requirements and interfaces (ahem Symbian ahem), and because it actually works quite well as a stable mobile OS which easily supports smooth user experiences (ahem WM ahem) and doesn't kill the device or require the end user to invest in bloated client or cloud services to do so. What about the iPhone? The app store pushes Apple even further down the path of delivering packaged content and experiences as the core service--it is a consumption not a creation mobile platform. The social address book is more about individual users creating and connecting, publishing and capturing.
Google Wave can be the Twitter in 3D for mobile. It takes the sweet spots of social networking, IM, and email and abstracts those features into a single UI. For T-Mobile, HTC, and Motorola in particular this should be an opportunity they throw all their weight behind to get right. Getting it right means not just packaging their own brand on top of Wave but creating a rich vision of how they see their customers interacting with each other, and then pushing developers and third parties to enable that for them rather than baking in their own walled garden type experiences.
This means actively embracing OneAPI and similar efforts. It means driving down service roadmaps to the product managers and then making sure product managers understand they don't own feature roadmaps and MRDs but instead they own integrating partners, supporting commercializtion of third party services, and most importantly delivering the voice of the customer throughout the ecosystem passionately, consistently, and clearly.
It also means extending real resources outside of corporate walls. The developer experiences for Android are surprisingly poor coming from Google (nice comparison to Symbian developer portal here) which gives service providers a great opportunity to influence through better programmatic support.