As for your point about email, the demo did address that issue in that yes, Wave is being published as protocol in the same way that email, http, ftp, etc. were all published and made available to all. They called it the three Ps: product, platform, and protocol, with the last being the relevant P.

So Wave is a product that Google will be releasing later this year, but it’s also a platform, which means that you can install a server to handle Waves just like you can install a server to handle email, or web pages, or whatever. Finally, since it’s also a protocol, other people can develop their own implementations of it, and integrate it into their own products. Just like you can have an email client that can support various email protocols, newsgroups, etc., you could create a client that could support the Wave protocol as well.

In the demo, they had a section where they talked about interacting with a couple outside companies that had implemented their own Wave servers and UIs. It operated pretty much like email, in that all they needed was the person’s address and the servers handled the rest.

As someone who works exclusively on a laptop, I’ve noticed how many websites assume their readers are using a much larger screen (could it be because nearly all web designers work on a large screen canvass?). With more and more people using netbooks, though, I’m wondering if more designers will be pressured to finally make their sites work in a smaller frame, which in turn means simplifying the layout more than making everything smaller (you’d hope). And here’s evidence that supports that simpler layout.

What’s the biggest impediment to things going that way? I think you nailed it in suggesting the “demands of different groups in an organization fighting for home-page space.”

Kevin: That would have been the false-start redesign in May 2000 where we tried to force people to click through to “section fronts”/topic pages before getting to story pages. Definitely during my time. I could tell stories! But another time.

In the ancient single-conversation versus branching-conversation divide (which, I agree, usually has non-geeks in the single-thread and geeks in the branching-thread camps) Wave is definitely coming down on the branching side.

I agree, Scott, that Wave has huge potential in the areas you mention. In that sense it’s less an “Outlook killer” than, say, a Basecamp killer.

Email’s great virtue (and also Achilles heel, in re: spam) is that it is fully open and public and it allows you to send messages out of the blue to people you don’t know as long as you have their address. What I’m wondering now — and maybe I missed it in that very long demo — is how (or whether) Wave allows for that kind of communication. If it doesn’t, then its utility is much narrower (though its vulnerability to spam is also much lower).

I’m reminded of when Salon.com revamped their web site a few years back and made the big mistake of changing the focus from the single stream of articles. They quickly reverted. I don’t remember if that was during your time their Scott.

As one of the main techy people in my small company, I can tell you that this has tremendous appeal. Just being able to install software on a web server that could then be available to everyone without installing new software on their individual machines would make life much easier. Also, new features and workflows would be much easier to implement and refine over time with a product like Wave because we could roll it out bit by bit. They didn’t get into it, but it’s not hard to imagine a calendaring and task management system that could be integrated with Wave to replicate all the functionality of Exchange server, but with much less cost. And the fact that everything runs natively from a modern browser means that people working offsite could be easily integrated without resorting to things like Outlook Web Access, which is cool, but lacks some of the important features of the rich client.

Especially cool was the idea of having a source control type system for collaboratively edited documents. That’s a major issue for my firm right now and something to manage the process of integrating content produced by a variety of people would be a huge plus for us. All in all, a very exciting idea.

(Actually, Wave looks like a cluttered up “Outlook Today” screen to me. Meanwhile, Gmail can’t let me see my Tasks in a pane? Argh.)