So how does the average person find out about wave - let alone learn all the terminology, how to use it, etc etc. We're only hearing the geeks feedback so far, because the rest of the world doesn't know/care it exists. I'd be interested if you have some examples of communication forms that geeks didn't start using first - email,sms,twitter, were all pretty geek lead...
I think the average person won't see how this solves any problems they have - facebook,twitter,email,sms all work pretty well for communication.
I can see your point about teams working together - business collaboration - I can see it making some inroads there.
Lots of the things I hear wave does are technically fun, but in practice, horrible design choices - showing text as people type it was the norm 20 years ago. Since then, we've pretty much all agreed it's irritating and not really useful.
Google replaces GMail's plumbing with Wave and the inherent abilities of Wave are introduced as GMail features. Robots, conversation splitting, collaboration, etc.
It's the only sane way to approach it, really.
And I have no idea why people keep harping on live typing. Google announced that there was going to be a way to turn it off about 5 minutes after they pulled the drape off Wave itself.
It's almost certainly a feature destined for the dustbin. As such, it's an utter red herring. Complaining about it is perhaps more pointless than the "it's too complicated" meme.
People probably keep harping on about live typing because it made no sense to include it. It's a gimmick rather than a useful feature.
Also it is too complicated for most people. You can't just ignore arguments and call them a 'meme' :)
Facebook wasn't. Or MySpace. I found out about FB from non-geek friends. I was shocked.
The average geek is equipped with many methods of communication and collaboration... So of course this just seems like a marginal improvement. The average normal person, though, uses mostly email, and so will find this client exceptionally useful. The average person will just see (perhaps not even explicitly) that it makes it easier to add people to ongoing email conversations, and that it's easy to attach files to the conversation, and that it's easier to branch off sub-conversations, etc.