I know everyone in the tech community is drooling over this, but I'd give it 50/50 odds at best. The real advantage it has going for it is that Google can throw a lot of weight behind it and maybe push it through with sheer force of will.<p>Here's the problem with Wave: what is it? Every blog post I've read about it struggled with how to explain it. I read this entire post and I'm still not sure of how I'm supposed to use this thing or what pressing problem it solves. Even the videos I've seen are super long, presumably because you can't really show it off in 60 seconds. "Well, it's kind of a mix between email and IM, but also with wiki functionality and social networking...oh, and it's got these crazy widgets and media sharing and stuff. Hmmm...you really have to play with it to understand." 97% of the people I know wouldn't get that, and don't have the patience to figure it out. It seems like it's just too flexible, that it can be used for a million different things, which makes it hard to know how to use at first. Think about almost every successful web site out there and how easy they are to explain, especially when they first launched. You would have zero trouble explaining Google, Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, Twitter, etc. in a 60 second video.<p>Wave is like FriendFeed on crack, and FF is already dangerously close to being too much for most normal people to grok. I just don't see it catching on.
In its early days ICQ had a mode that allowed you to see what the other user typed before he hit "send" - just like google wave seems to do. I hated it - I like to edit my message and make sure it's right before others see it.<p>I see value in others getting updates without hitting refresh, though.
I can't help but wonder why they didn't try harder to fix spam.
As far as i've been able to tell, it'll be same-old/same-old: Mark as spam, possibly automatic filters.<p>It seems to me that part of the answer to the question "What would e-mail look like if invented today" should be "there would be no spam".<p>Couldn't it be done by request/approve like on Skype/Facebook or something more advanced like reputation or something?