And only working hard with peers, without knowledge of who-where-how-when, on common tasks&events I realized it.
When ppl say that Wave don’t share commons with emails, chat and blogs… ppl are right. Thinking or comparing Wave with existant tools can only make confusion about what it is and which are the best purpose in using it.

For developers and architects could be interesting reading how the R&S team in SAP are trying to outperform their tools with Wave technologies: http://remagio.posterous.com/blogs-says-users-have-no-idea-about-howwhy-to

In fact, both (Wave and Twitter) have their value.
I could imagine Twitter information to be posted into another form, into the Wave form, for matching different use cases, different reading experience.
Indeed, it sounds like Twitter is like SAX (event-oriented), while Wave is more like DOM (tree-based) !

If Wave is going to be enough polished, then Wave may be able to cross, to get over the last meters that make an application attractive.
Well, to do so, Wave has a good base because it just looks like Wave is little better than other solutions.

Wave provides the following plus according to concurrent solutions:
* DOM representation /versus/ Twitter
I still think Wave is a bit better, because readers are more familiar with DOM presentation. And, I imagine a Wave-based Twitter as a list of waves, a vertical flow of waves.

* WYSIWYG edition + multiple concurrent writers + wave replay /versus/ wiki

* gadget + robots /versus/ portlet container

* synchronous + collaborative edition /versus/ (asynchronous) email

* extensibility /versus/ forge

For Wave for forge use case: see http://www.jroller.com/dmdevito/entry/google_wave_or_wikis_could
For Wave versus other competitors (wiki, email, portal): see
see http://www.jroller.com/dmdevito/entry/google_wave_more_a_collaboration

But it looks like not enough for Wave to become indispensable:
- these are not enough disruptive features
- other competiting tools may evolve too to include those features during the Wave beta period (some wikis already provide a WYSIWYG editor)
- currently, a friend using Wave told me Wave is not fast enough, not enough polised, still in beta…

Then, so far, and up to now, there is nothing proven indispensable in Wave.

But let’s see things differently.

IMHO, Wave is more a collaboration tool than a communication tool: http://www.jroller.com/dmdevito/entry/google_wave_more_a_collaboration
It’s may be a reason Wave does not appear at first sight as indispensable, because people communicate much more than they collaborate.
Communication looks like cars, while collaboration is similar to trucks used to put your previous house items into well-defined *named* boxes in order to find them easily while settling into your next house: well, people use more cars than they use trucks… and while cars are indispensable, trucks too, but into another high-end niche market.

But, today, the main advantage carried by Wave is that it’s a cross-frontier technology (that may be competiting with wiki, email, collaboration tools, and even portals, CMS, forge…).
So, Wave shakes up the landscape, it pushes to think again about old frontiers people thought permanent. And from that point of view, up to now, it’s may be indispensable

One thing that disappoints me with Wave (besides the cryptic interface) is that they have not addressed spam. Wave should have a build in model that made spam irrelevant.

The main complaint I have against google wave is that though it has many cool aspects which make for a neat demo it does not seem to solve any of the hard problems of communication. Let me discuss email for a moment. In its infancy a lot of people saw email as a silly idea in the same way a lot of people regard twitter today, but email solved a lot of the really hard problems of communication and has justifiably become the de facto standard of communication in the modern age. Before email there were in person meeting, phone calls, conference calls, and physical letters (or interoffice memos). Written communication has a significant advantage in editability (mentally or physically) which allows the finished form to result from numerous iterations of a reflectlion/(re)composition cycle which results in far more understandable, concise, and accurate communications. However, it suffers from a horrible latency problem, and terribly expensive cost of transmission. In verbal communication these cycles of reflection/composition are replaced by cycles of misunderstanding, questioning(or argument), and re-expression which eventually (one hopes) narrow in on the same information, but with less efficiency (because others don’t know what you are thinking and so may ask the wrong clarifying questions) and at a greater cost because more people are involved. Conference calls and physical meetings have lower latency than written communication but they come at a much higher opportunity cost in attendee time, suffer from all the problems of verbal communication, and are difficult to keep on track. Email provides many of the benefits of other forms of communication in one form, dramatically increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of communication. Email gives the composability advantages of written communication without the high cost of shuffling paper around, provides the low latency of physical meetings and conference calls without the interruption in workflow and extreme cost of veering off topic. More so, email is stored and (nominally) searchable, providing new capabilities that other forms of communication did not have before. These reasons are why email is so dominant and exists as the primary form of communication for nearly all modern companies in the industrialized world. Today we are starting to run into many of the limitations of email, but it’s important to remember why it is so popular in the first place, because it solved many of the hard problems of previous forms of communication.

Google search is another excellent example of a successful disruptive technology. In a time when most search was primitive, low-quality (based on keywords and meta data), and slow google revolutionized search. With page rank, revolutionary data center design, and sharding/mapreduce google was able to produce better searches faster at a lower cost. Google searches solved, simultaneously, most of the hard problems of search at the time, which is why all modern search has been following in its footsteps.

Google wave however does not seem to solve any hard problems. It solves a few easy problems (instant communication, for example), and it adds a degree of novelty which look cool in a demo, but in the end it still misses the mark. Indeed, if anything it looks like wave regresses in several areas, favoring instant, verbal communication (see above for the problems of verbal communication, and the costs of meetings/con-calls). Merging email, wiki, and bug-tracking into one unified tool is a natural idea who’s time has come, I think, but I don’t think google has executed well on that idea. It remains to be seen whether this is merely an abortive attempt on google’s part or whether they can evolve wave into something worthwhile, something that solves the legitimately hard problems of modern communication.

Wave is in many ways a new format. So, is it 10 times better?

I was a Wave skeptic until the recent Google Test Automation Conference (www.gtac.biz) in Zurich.

My two tweets about it:
http://twitter.com/jhuggins/status/5068389905
http://twitter.com/jhuggins/status/5068962101

In the past, people would have an IRC back-channel for commenting in real-time during a conference talk. But that’s very geeky (even among geeks!) and does not seem common in practice. In the recent past (and present) people send out quick tweets during a presentation. Also the phrase “live blogging” has the same roots when combining plain old blogging with reporting a live event…

But before GTAC, I’d hadn’t thought of Wave as useful tool for that same situation. With the tree structure and editable nature of a Wave… it *fixes* the problem of IRC, where you can go back and fix a line that was inaccurate or vague. Or even add pictures or video to previous points in the transcript. With IRC, if you don’t respond to a question posted immediately, you quickly get of context.

In the ‘live note taking’ use case… Wave is better than IRC because it’s a tad less geeky, it’s editable, it’s stored and easily accessible later. And Wave is better than Twitter… because you use more than 140 characters.

HOWEVER, outside of live note taking… I haven’t seen a “killer app” reason to use Wave. Even though I remain a general Wave skeptic… I specifically think it is better than all other alternatives (irc, blog, twitter) for live/public note taking during an event.

But since we’re now everyone is talking about the “realtime” web… Using wave during “realtime” events might just be its “specifically indispensable” niche. And it might end up being a pretty big niche.