No, I didn't see that. It still boggles me how and why it ever became such
a popular service.

Did you see the pole that Guy Kawasaki ran about, if they decided to charge for it, how much would people be prepared to pay? Do you know what 60%+ of the respondents said? They'd pay for it not to exist at all.

I wouldn't call Google Wave a “Twitter killer” though. Wave and Twitter
serve different purposes. Twitter is a poor communication tool for the
reasons you mentioned. If you want an open dialogue with someone, Twitter
is not the medium to use. You would probably use email or instant
messaging, or Wave.

Twitter is really more for sharing small bits information than it is
collaboration and communication. If Twitter ever dies, it won't be because
Google Wave killed it.

For one, I think that email needs to be better integrated than what you've described. You are proposing that someone could be invited via email to a wave. However, in order to participate in the conversation they still need to join the wave. If they don't have a wave account (somewhere, assuming we are talking about a federated environment) yet, this is a big hassle.

It is a lot like if you get an email from someone sending you pictures posted on XYZ Picture Hosting service. However, if you want to see the pictures you need to sign up for an account. This is a major pain and a lot of people won't bother with it, so you will lose a lot of participants.

I think your idea of creating a “tsunami” for containing other waves for use within a group will work. It is definitely better than using a single wave and continually overwriting it. It would still be better to have group contact management, but the tsunami concept is a good workaround to use until Google (or someone else) implements better contact management.

In other words, while I must agree all the features you listed would be really helpful if they were implemented, but it does not make Google Wave any less “ready” for the public.

I’m a big fan of Google Wave. A huge fan in fact. I’ve written about it, posted a screencast about using it in conference collaboration and have much more about it in my writing queue. I love the promise of……

The first thing that really bothers me is that (like you mentioned) contact management users Google Contacts. This should be fine as I use it (and it syncs to mobile devices, etc). Great. Except, like you said, the fact that it lumps everyone together with no way to discern who is a Wave user and who is regular contact. I like that they're trying to integrate Wave participants as regular contacts, but they should create a group in GContacts and have everyone who is added in Wave automatically added to that group. For me that would facilitate the management of my thirty some odd Wave users from the sea of some 600 contacts.

A nit-picky point, but major usability issue is that when you click the + in the contacts pane, the focus doesn't automatically go to the input box. So you type into nothingness until you click. It's little, but really annoying.

Not being able to remove people really bothers me as well.

I thought when I saw the Playback feature demoed that while playing back, you could go back at any point to a previous version. I have had people really mess up the structure of a Wave (by accident, although maliciousness is possible too) and there is no way to go back.

I'd like to comment on the “Ping” feature. If you use this from within a Wave it makes a private blip between you and the person you pinged. The next time they log on (or if they are online) they get a pop-up. This is all great. The problem lies in the fact that you cannot delete these ping-related blips, even if they are empty. This is a source of major frustration for me as it often destroys the flow of collaborative documents.

Finally, the e-mail situation: why can't blah@gmail.com be our Wave address (or, once federated, user@domain.com)? Barring this, at the VERY least, I think that e-mails to blah@googlwave.com become a new wave in the inbox with the contents of the e-mail, if the mailer is a Wave user, they are added as a participant. I don't even need any back-and-forth functionality to start. I just think this would be a great way of getting info from current systems into wave without having to copy paste. The other e-mail functionality, which I'm sure to come, can happen later.

Great post, well written, bang on, and very informative.

The good news is that being a federated protocol, someone else may beat
Google to reverse compatibility and develop some kind of Wave client/service
that integrates both email and Wave.

I've got my invite and am now twiddling my thumbs waiting for other people I know to get their wave invites. I have no interest in 'waving' people I don't know. In addition I want to email them from and receive emails in wave but have to move between services to do so.

My overall impression leads to a resounding fail for google at this point.