I'm not sure if your comment is sarcastic or not - but isn't Gmail a way to slurp/index all the world's emails, text messages, and similar communications? It is

I'm not sure if your comment is sarcastic or not - but isn't Gmail a way to slurp/index all the world's emails, text messages, and similar communications? It isn't like a bunch of engineers were sitting around and thinking "Gmail doesn't get us enough user information, how can we make a new one to get more?". Their thought process was (conceivably) more along the lines of "Gmail doesn't quite work how we want it to, what can we do to fix that?". Slurping all of the information out of it is just a nice benefit. That said, I haven't actually tried to do any work on Wave, so I can't speak for its usefulness. As a pure email replacement, I find it comparable to Gmail, minus the inferior keyboard shortcuts in Wave.