The Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.

Google was foolish to release Wave to non-developers this early. Now you have bozos like this guy complaining about the need for features that haven't been implemented just yet, like draft mode (suppresses live keystrokes.)

On top of that, for some reason guys like these seem to want to say something about Wave, but few have anything meaningful to say, especially the empty-husk tech pundits. So they'll just spout something empty that sounds nice.

I've been using Wave for months. It's great. It's early in development. It's called a preview for a reason.

Stop comparing it to Twitter. In fact, stop comparing x against Twitter, or y against Facebook, or z as the iPhone killer, etc. Gahhhh.

Also, dupe.

Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881802

I'm with Mr. Manjoo here. Check out that screenshot -- it looks like an interface nightmare similar to AOL in the 90's. Where are my eyes supposed to go? What do I click on? Personally, I find this a noted departure from the simplicity I like in Google's other products -- this looks more like outlook than it does gmail.

I'm also curious about the potential use cases for such a tool. I can see students using this a lot, I guess, but I don't know if I see anything compelling enough to make me change the way I use email.

With regard to the real-time transmission of what you type in chat, the only benefit I see in something like this is that you potentially avoid those IM conversations where one person changes the subject, and the other person is still typing something about what you had just been talking about. It can help avoid the sometimes disjointed topic changes because you can each see what the other is actively typing. Aside from that, it seems much more like a "we did it because we could" feature, and one that detracts from the experience more than it adds.