Time will tell, but for a tool that's meant for getting work done, live chat is a serious productivity killer. I don't see people get excited about instant updates of what the others are typing. I admit, it's very cool for a demo, but I don't want people watching while my son manages to get hold of the keyboard and types in random characters.
Second, first impressions really are important. If most of the features people want are not yet implemented, then folks will not look back. That's what happens on the Internet all the time with otherwise cool products. For other google products I could think of one would immediately see the benefit. With GMail or the search engine noone thought, "oh, this is so alpha, I need to wait 1 year before it's useful". Finally, IMHO the problem with email is that we get a lot of mail we don't really care about, and don't get mail we are really interested in. The one that decides who reads what is the sender, and this person often does not have all the information who is interested in what. Google Wave doesn't solve this particular problem, because again the sender decides who gets to read the wave. I agree Wave is an improvement over email, but should we try to build "better email" or something completely different? Twitter might not be a good comparison, agreed, but I find that wikis fulfill a similar role and are better in many respects- diffs are easier to scan than replays, there's usually RSS/Atom updates when someone edits a page, and plain text is just easier to move around and transform than writing your own bot. Then maybe it's just me. I refused to use Twitter initially and couldn't see how it could be useful for quite some time. Wave can still be a huge success, but I think it won't be the Wave we know. My 2 c. Vassil > I don't agree with Scoble on this one. > > His criticisms of both email and wave are very valid, but his dismissal > is rather shortsighted. Wave is barely even worthy of an 'alpha' label, > let alone a 'beta'. Several of his concerns (deleting waves, BCC, > social networking, etc.) are features planned but not yet implemented. > If he's looking for a finished product, then he's simply looking for the > wrong thing at this time. Otherwise, "patches welcome, Scoble." > > Furthermore, Wave and Twitter are very different beasts. I wouldn't > compare them at all. I think this comparison is much better: > > http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-google-wave.html > > Wave solves problems for teams working together, particularly in-house > document sharing. It has _a_lot_ of missing features, but with the work > being done on it, I expect a fair bit of improvement over the next year > or two.
