So, the new thing they did is that they combined Chat and Wiki and then threw some API for mashing up. Made it pretty and Ajaxy. Well, mmm, Ok. I guess many people will like it.
I still prefer plain-text emails, though.
I still prefer plain-text emails, though.
Don't fall in the trap of using word choice to make something sound insignificant. Having several people edit the same document in real-time without problems, clearly see when and who updated what, and quickly look at the document's history (honestly, sites like Wikipedia's history feature is just ugly and clunky) can't really be called a wiki.
The interface looks really busy from the screenshot and generally doesn't look like products Google usually makes (Chrome, Gmail have pretty clean interfaces, but maybe that's because I'm accustomed to them). If anything, I'm more interested in using the protocol and building a stripped-down version of it.
The possibilities of this product is mind boggling. But will the complexity and learning curve be a stumbling block in adoption? Even if the consumer product doesn't take off, I expect wave to be hit in companies where people need to collaborate frequently especially since they can host their own wave server and not worry about hosting data with google.
If they can make a web app that can let users unify their various notification/collaboration streams (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, delicious, Flickr, IM, email...) then they have a winner. Especially if they can make a slick mobile version.
However, if you look at the Gmail+Gtalk use-case, the fact that all conversations that go through Google's Jabber servers are automatically indexed and searchable in Gmail alone is a killer feature (this also works if you use a desktop client like Adium, the point is, it makes sense to use Google as your IM provider for the indexing).
So the point is, keeping as many docs/conversations/etc in some centralized Google app may be worth it just for the search/indexing.
My final conclusion then is that other companies, in the long term, may have to implement Google-like search functionality (and storage), otherwise Google will suck up their application's users with search as a killer feature.
The merger of email, IM, and twitter into a new messaging system has tremendous potential.
I would say that it's just to early to tell. Perhaps when I try it out it will replace everything else.