| From the server to the client these are the things wave is/was: 1. server: the ability for you and me (or equally easily your company and mine) to run our own exchange servers 2. client: the ability have true threaded conversations - not crude conventions that denote conversations, which could at any point be converted into finished documents 3. client: the ability to include new participants into the conversation while allowing them to actually see the progression of the conversation before they joined. 4. client: the ability to have an arbitrary amount of open automation at every point of the message's lifecycle. emphasis on open because anybody could write an automaton (robot, agent) to automate things - not just google. there're more but that list in and of itself is a few orders of magnitude better than the current state-of-the-art for email. What it has, but neednt: 1. the update as you type feature. it is still cool, but really not required for everything else that wave is. 2. the unnecessary digressions from standard web technology. why did we have to have a huge public discourse on a scroll bar, for eg? What it should have had, but didnt: 1. a way to bridge current email into wave. This was the single most important thing google should have done - allow people in email land to send you an email that would show up as a "dumb" wave, and have the ability to send out email updates to such people with the full snapshot of the wave as the response. yes, its dumb again, but we're used to "reply all with inline comments". 2. artificial scarcity on access to wave. worked for gmail because you could taunt others by sending them emails. not so much with wave. |