Paul Bucheit, the creator of Gmail and co-founder of FriendFeed commented on Wave killing email and said, “Email is not going to disappear. Possibly ever. Until the robots kill us all.” When asked for further comments regarding Wave, he noted that he hadn’t actually tried Wave yet.
Well, he finally did. And didn’t change his opinion:
So now that I’ve tried Wave, do I expect it to kill email? No. The reason that nothing is going to kill email anytime soon is quite simple: email is universal (or as close to it as anything on the Internet). Email has all kinds of problems and I often hate it, but the fact is that it mostly works, and there’s a huge amount of experience and infrastructure supporting it. The best we can do is to use email less, and tools like Wave and Docs are a big help here.
What’s particularly interesting to note is that he continued and said, “I don’t know what Google has planned for Wave or Gmail, but if I were them I would continue improving Wave, and then once it’s ready for the whole world to use, integrate it into Gmail.”
He didn’t expound upon what an integrated Gmail and Wave would look like.
It’s pretty obvious that Google Wave radically changes how we communicate and is, due to such newness, hard to understand by some. Based on what we’ve seen from Wave so far, it’s basically everything that email isn’t. What we’ve known are static emails; now, through Wave, we have live documents.
Even though Wave is still under heavy development and will be continually refined, would it be possible to integrate two opposites with stark differences? Of course, we can always settle for the happy medium, but what does that mean? We’d get halfway dynamic documents? Or would we just send the “gadgets” idea over to Gmail and lose real-time collaboration (Buchiet commented that real-time collaboration is “problematic”)?
Sure, Wave won’t probably replace email in the near future. And it needs work (a lot, actually). But a possible Gmail/Wave cross might lose many of the unique characteristics of Wave.