This seems pretty much like a straw man argument. The notion that Facebook concentrates upon user experience, given all the privacy wrangling and complaints ab

This seems pretty much like a straw man argument. The notion that Facebook concentrates upon user experience, given all the privacy wrangling and complaints about the user interface being needlessly changed or being too convoluted, seems to be not very well founded. Fundamentally the concept of Wave seemed good, and I think there is (or will be in future) a demand for something better than email which consolidates email, instant messaging, microblogging and some project/time management features into a single interface. I think what happened with Wave was not that they concentrated too much upon the engineering but precisely the opposite. If they had spent more time engineering a slick, fast system which scales to large multi-user conversations without crashing or grinding to a halt and integrated easily with legacy email systems from the beginning to allow a seamless transition then there would have been a much bigger chance of Wave becoming a success.