I loved google wave -- it was great and ahead of its time. I think it was a major mistake that google let it go and that the apache wave foundation never got it going. it is too late now but really a greatly missed opportunity.
(2) It tried to be an all-in-one comm platform, and because of that it excelled in none of what it tried to do.
(3) Poor UI performance was the death sentence of it. If you can't use it fluently, it's not good for real-time. Poor UI design did not help, on top of that.
It was an interesting experiment, but not all experiments end up with a successful product. I hope the ideas will be unearthed at some moment and reused with a greater effect.
Real-time email is a contradiction in terms, as (at least for me) being asynchronous is one of the main defining features of email. Essentially any chat app, from IRC to Slack, can be called "real-time" email. To me, the phrase "real-time email" sounds like calling a submarine an "underwater car".
IMs hit the sweet spot between fully real-time (like the phone) and fully async (like paper mail).
The UI is built for efficient real-time communication, but the underlying data model (the log, notifications, statuses, etc) allows for very easy async communication.
I think someone could make a great product by just adding IM-like UI features on top of an existing email backend. Email is pretty fast these days to work as mostly-instant communication.
I agree! Check out https://delta.chat. I use it every day for emailing. Subject lines are the ellipsized first words of your body and every message is a new email.
I wonder what would have happened if they used the tech to build a chat application instead of an email-killer.