The "see you typing" thing disappeared to a large extent from IM clients because it was <i>horrible</i>. Users don't like other people seeing their "thoughts" and it creates a much stronger pressure to formulate/complete an immediate answer.<p>And the "robot" thing is just inane - it's not like bots are hard to interface with e-mail or with the web; it's just that at the current level few bots are very interesting beyond the very basic (IRC type) bots that keep track of when people last were around etc.<p>Wave looks interesting, but because it provides distributed/federated group chat / document editing / collaboration more than it competes with e-mail.<p>I'd be much more inclined to see it as an alternative to (some) wiki's and project collaboration tools like Basecamp than to e-mail.
I'm getting tired of the whole "OMG this new thing is going to blow your mind away" quickly followed by "Sorry, it's not available yet" gig.<p>2009: the year of hypeware.
I hate online chat. Hate it hate it hate it. Sitting there waiting for someone to type back at you, it's totally stupid. I'll never use this Google Wave. Email is good enough for me. And nothing can replace a good old phone call.
This is how it came to be:<p>Inside the Google Headquarters:<p>Marketing/Finance Guy: Hey we need "live" search, its hot right now!<p>Tech Guy: Go buy twitter!<p>MG: Are you crazy we're in a recession, we don't have the money.<p>TG: Ok I have this old new-way-of-doing-email sideproject, that was kind of "live".<p>MG: Great, can you make it even more "live"?<p>TG: (sarcastic)Well the users could see each other typing.<p>MG: (exited) Great! Make it so!<p>TG: (concerned) That would kill our server if we ever released it.<p>MG: Don't worry we wont release it, just prepare a demo.<p>TG: And if we eventually release it?<p>MG: We make it Open Source, so somebody else will run it and their servers will crash.