[bane]

True, which is probably why google put im right next to the message viewer in gmail. I know of many ocassions where a flurry of emails turned into an im session.

I think gmail's "conversations" are really the first try at what I'm talking about, a new front end on email, but I don't think they work well enough personally. And they haven't really expanded well on the concept recently.

[chetan51]

Google Wave was really what I thought the ideal marriage between email and IM. Why did it fail again?

[noahth]

1) incredibly poor rollout strategy (imo) 2) what problem did it actually solve again?

forgive any appearance of snark; i just wanted to be concise, and i don't think that "the ideal marriage between email and IM" is something that people were - or are - desperately crying out to have.

[cstejerean]

I believe it failed in part because of the slow rollout (nobody you cared about had access yet) and lack of interop with email for notifications about changes, etc. I tried using it, and gave up. By the time it became widely available most of the early adopters gave up as well.

[Scaevolus]

The things that turned me off were:

1) Busy, complex interface.

2) Sluggishness.

I find Convore to be a much better way to approach the same problem of how to enhance email.