How not to replace email: lessons from Google Wave
Wave was cool technology with interesting ideas, but there is no substitute for getting the user interface right, and unfortunately they didn't. It's been a long time and there might be others I'm forgetting, but there were two important design errors:<p>1. Email lets you type an entire message before sending; IRC at least lets you type a whole paragraph, which is enough. Wave didn't let you type more than one character before sending.<p>2. The designers correctly realized chronological order isn't enough, you also want logical order, but unfortunately they provided the latter <i>instead of</i> the former, whereas you actually need <i>both</i>. (Gmail provides both: new messages and threads. Git provides both: view changes, and view current code. Google Docs provides both. Either view alone does not suffice.)<p>I would by all means encourage someone to take another shot at building something like Wave, with those problems fixed.