I'm anxiously awaiting GoogleDresser, so I can find those missing socks and one of my favorite t-shirts.

You will never find your socks. Google wants you to buy new socks. From them.

*from someone who pays them to advertise socks; per click.

Google is going to release Google Dresser, and it will be absolutely free! It will keep your whole wardrobe on the server and provide a simple and intuitive user interface through which you can browse, create, and wear outfits.

Google is willing to give away these dressers for free because Google makes money through the dresser advertisements, so the more time you spend with your dresser, the more advertising opportunities they have. Thus Google wants to make a better dressing experience for you because ultimately it turns into more revenue for them.

Next up: Google Life, helping you do more and reducing your need to sleep.

I know you guys are all joking, but those things really scare me.

Wave is an open protocol and third-party wave servers, which Google won't be able to search, will be peers in the wave network. So I don't see Google Wave giving any more access to raw communication than they have already.

It is open, but most[1] people are going to use the Google-provided servers. Businesses who want to keep their data safe can have an internal wave server, but these aren't the kind of places which would allow employees to use Gmail for their business communications...

[1] Wild assumption, but I expect that the numbers will bear this out.

I'm not sure if your comment is sarcastic or not - but isn't Gmail a way to slurp/index all the world's emails, text messages, and similar communications? It isn't like a bunch of engineers were sitting around and thinking "Gmail doesn't get us enough user information, how can we make a new one to get more?". Their thought process was (conceivably) more along the lines of "Gmail doesn't quite work how we want it to, what can we do to fix that?". Slurping all of the information out of it is just a nice benefit.

That said, I haven't actually tried to do any work on Wave, so I can't speak for its usefulness. As a pure email replacement, I find it comparable to Gmail, minus the inferior keyboard shortcuts in Wave.