[stcredzero]

Wave looks interesting, but because it provides distributed/federated group chat / document editing / collaboration more than it competes with e-mail.

But isn't this precisely where computer use is trending? The whole Web 2.0 thing in retrospect was as mass of more mainstream users discovering that interacting with and getting to know others resulted in many cool things. It's been trending that way since we had 300 baud modems dialing in to BBS. Add to that, the discovery that interaction is a lot more fun when it's about something, like pictures, journal writing, software, news...

But we are still at the infancy stages when it comes to collaboration. Things like the "Minority Report" style multi-touch interfaces, Microsoft Table, and Reactable are the direction we should go. We need interfaces that aren't designed for one person to focus all of their input on one machine. We need interfaces that let us focus our attention on communally manipulated digital media and each other with equal ease.