There are currently plenty of ways to communicate with people, the interaction, integration, aggregation and analysis is where Wave’s value will be shown. I can see this being used extensively in tech teams to begin with, and in planning and design-build-test cycles. But it’s going to need people to get on board with it. I can’t see it replacing email/im in any sensible way in the near future, although I’d love that to happen, because people will be unwilling to learn something new or lazy to change to a new system.

Things like sharing photos, music, videos in a nice interface is good, but the main stumbling point in my mind is that not enough of my friends and family are on it yet, and that would be my use-case until I had more in the way of a tech project use for it. I felt that when I first got my Wave invite with only 2 contacts to communicate with, it was pretty useless. Collaborative editing and shared privileges work well in this environment and I’d like to see some integration into WordPress and Blogger, this would make things eminently useful to me right now as a method for getting around the Great Firewall of China. With the aid of some tweeting bots, wave provides me with access to twitter, but nothing else particularly useful so far.