I think that the fact that google is behind it is in fact that only thing that drives all this media attention, it means that if it is anywhere near successful that it is going to set the bar for collaborative systems, and set it considerably higher than it has been before.

Cisco and a whole bunch of others have been trying to put together a comprehensive suite of tools to do all this, but so far they've failed to make it feel seamless. Google might change that, they've certainly got the resources to make it happen.

Just like there was already free email before gmail and search before google came along, it's a major event.

But I agree with you that all the components have been seen before, maybe with the exception of a system like this having an API.

Key idea: if N people sending emails to each other are all on Gmail, then Google can keep only one copy of the email discussion and show it to all N of them.

This is why gmail-to-gmail emails arrive so quickly.

More generally, rather than using point-to-point protocols to make N(N-1)/2 pairwise connections between N people, there are certain new possibilities if everyone just maintains a single link to a document (a Wave) hosted on the server.

Wave is kind of the inverse of P2P. Downloading is more efficient if you can simultaneously download from N people. Uploading is more efficient if you only need to upload to one server.

That's a good explanation, thanks.

i got an invite yesterday and my bit of playing around in my own wave (no other contacts have wave) - was of no excitement (say compared to gmail when it came around)

however I can imagine super productivity in communication/im for teams sitting across continents.

A tiny advantage of wave is that you can watch your colleague typing realtime. Those two minutes of impatient waiting (specially during a heated discussion) now would be drastically shortened. You could forget IM etiquettes during 'waving'.

I also thought of similarity with etherpad (specially the code while on the phone interview which was discussed earlier on HN)- where the interviewer may see the interviewee coding live.

imho, google wave may not matter now, when the users grow to decent numbers, we will find out.

PS: your gmail id becomes your google wave id (I had a good wave-id in the sandbox, i ended up getting my gmail account to the public preview).

Slightly off topic, but I'd be interested to see what 37signals have to say about Wave, since it seems to encroach on their core business with the added benefit of Wave being free.

Yeah, they sure do hate competition. Remember Huddle Chat, an awesome, free group chat client written by some Google Engineers on Google App Engine in his/her spare time, and the whining from 37signals that ensued? It's ridiculous.