Wave Goodbye to E-mail?

Just watched Serenty and the Firefly series again. When they communicate they use 'waves'. :-)

Problem is that it's a great idea but it's all on Google's servers!

Your appreciations are correct, google created a very much anticipated demand for this ubercool service, however, the wave wasn't quite ready yet. Then it took forever to get an invite, and when I finally got it, none of the people I know had wave, so it rendered the service useless.

Later, I got the ability to invite people, but It was too late, the momentum was already over.

I am managing two different projects (each of those with 3 people) and wave works nicely.

What google should do is promote the extensions, some of them are really nice and usefull and also do the integration into gmail.

I believe they will do both once google wave reaches a more stable state (althought I have not experienced "wave not in sync" for months now)

I personally don't see much use for Wave currently. However, I can definitely see great potential (esp. for long distance tabletop RPGs...e.g. DnD). That being said, I think the majority of the issues with Wave are that Google has tried to make it completely separate from your email. If they were to completely integrate it with the various other Google products (email, docs, reader, etc.), it would be more useful.

I agree. Maybe I'm just habit bound, but after the initial excitement wore off, it seemed more work to use Wave than anything else, and I reverted back to my old patterns. On the other hand, when I encountered twitter, I was off and running and I never looked back, so it's not like I can't incorporate new methods of communication.

Assuming Wave matures at some point and more people I know start using it, I'll probably end up revisiting Wave.

Some of the ideas from Google Wave appear to be finding their way into other products. The recent update to Google Docs features real-time collaborative character-by-character editing which almost certainly came from Wave. I have a wave account but can't come up with anything to use it for.

I see at least a couple of things wrong with Wave at the moment.
1. It takes at least two to tango. Unless you have critical mass on a particular Wave, it will die out. Reaching that critical mass is difficult.
2. Unix news servers have provided permanence and attachments for years. Some even integrate with email feeds. The problem is: see #1.
3. Google Wave's added value is now/here communication (I can see you type). Other models support not now/not here styles as well. We're a lot more accustomed to the latter.
4. Not sure how this is all going to work out with folks attempting to use this for work-based communication.
5. The metaphor for Wave's creating a "document" is at odds with most people's expectations of what a "document" is. Unless and until Wave can 1) import a Word .doc file (or equivalent, or import from Google Docs) into a blip, or support a better model of shared editing, this disconnect won't go away for a lot of people.

After all this, I am truly rooting for Wave to succeed. Right now, though, it looks like a solution in search of a problem.

Google Wave is still in a preview stage, I think it has a great deal of potential when more people are able to quickly access it. I don't really see it as a alternative to email, but rather a real time Forum for project-style collaboration.

Once its bugs have been ironed out and made publicly accessible I think we may begin to see some results.

The only thing that I see coming out of Wave ( and Facebook ) is a more reliable vetting of identity. The establishment of relationships and friend-to-friend links means that spam is difficult-to-impossible to send.

I am absolutely certain that big lumps of wave will be integrated with the other "Google experience" once it reaches beta (it's still preview).

Some of the elements from wave just got implementet into google docs, so the failure is more of the model where this technique is being kept in a separate box, rather than a failure of the technique itself.

wave.google.com might eventually die, but soo much of the tricks they've been trying out there (they = we) will live on in some morphed form.