Sadly meatless article. I recently created a Wave account, and the real "psychology of Wave" is that the people who created it don't understand the reasoning b

Sadly meatless article. I recently created a Wave account, and the real "psychology of Wave" is that the people who created it don't understand the reasoning behind all the different types of communication people use, and so they decided that it'd be dandy to mash them all together with -- horrors! -- live typing. It's worse than IM, because of the live typing (not an option!), the fact that people can see your mistakes, and you have to click the damn "Done" button every time. Not to mention, your replies don't necessarily end up at the bottom. I experienced a situation where I was continuing my thread of thinking, and the other person replied to one of my previous points. I could no longer add a message at the end of the conversation, it always replied to their last message. So message B was above message A. It's worse than email, for many of the same reasons. It, in theory, could be better for document collaboration, but the interface is clearly designed with IM/chat in mind (even though it's badly implemented), and so it's impossible to use it to create documents. There are many competitors to it for document creation that work better, more fluidly, and with less hassle. (SubEthaEdit, Bespin, etc.) IM, email, and other media are used because of their inherent differences. Asynchronicity has enormous usefulness, it's not just a relic of "inferior protocols" as Google engineers seem to think. Having multiple channels for different types and flavors of communication, too, is a GOOD thing. Sadly, it's clear that they had no ethnographers, "design thinkers," or even a person who "gets people" on the team. Their UI widgets may be pretty and make sense in their incredibly narrow context (the mouseover stuff is nice), but sadly, the whole ecosystem is simply not fit for survival. Too bad. I can think of 15 or 20 ways that they could REALLY improve communication on the web, if only they had "people people" on their teams.