Michael Heilemann: I think it’s a project collaboration tool more than anything. Google’s pitching it as an e-mail replacement, but I just don’t see that happening.

Well it certainly doesn’t help Google Wave that you have to have a Google Wave account to both send and receive waves… so I’m also skeptic for now. But if I do think about Google Wave as stemming from someone who wanted to reinvent email, a lot of things, mentally, fall in place.

And yes, I think it will work as a project collaboration tool. Instead of creating a new Google Doc and sharing it with people as I’ve done so far, I’ll be creating waves in the future. Sure.

Michael Heilemann: Not only for legacy and inertial reasons, but because it’s too ‘muddy’ in its treatment of replies and threads and what not.

In my mind, that’s not a problem with the wave “skeleton” if you will, but rather the surface layer, which is incidentally the most easy one to tweak. In other words, a few rounds of usability testing, some design tweaks and in a few years, Google will have unmuddied it.

Michael Heilemann: E-mail may be old, but it works exactly _because_ it’s so simple.

But I don’t think email is that simple, to be honest, and i’m not laying all the blame on spam here.

Let’s jump right past the whole issue of POP3, IMAP and Webmail, which certainly complexifies email tech in its own right.

Email is based on the file metaphor. You send a file. You receive a file. You store a file. (That file being the email, not attachments, bear with me).

Things are moving towards the “i don’t care where files are stored” cloud metaphor; we’ve already seen that with iTunes, iPhoto and Google Docs — Docs being the best example. You don’t store 50 copies of the same file, you only store it once, and _access_ it from several places.

Google Wave, as seen though the “email reinvention” googles fixes this problem. It’s imap on steroids. You don’t send something, you give people access to something. This is a paradigm away from the file-based email, and in my mind, that is simple. Email is not. “Sent mail”, “All mail”, “inbox”, “outbox”. SHOO! Sent, archived, received, not sent — those are attributes of a single email. Rid me of it!