You bring up a lot of very good points. I still rely heavily on email and it is still one of the best ways to get notified when new content is happening. I also use Twitter in a similar fashion in order to keep track of blogs and other news. I use it to aggregate a bunch of data sources into a single stream so that I don’t have to constantly check 50 sites.

Your last paragraph is right on point. Part of me thinks that Google Wave is just a prototype for where Google would like Gmail to be in a few years. The underlying aspects of email are still present in Wave and I think that these will continue to be important for years to come. I think once Wave becomes more popular and we are able to work with the Wave content outside of the wave.google.com website, it will be even more useful. I expect mobile and desktop applications for Wave to start showing up in the coming months.

Thanks for the good insight!!

Similarly, if you belong to five different social networking and micro-blogging sites because you’re just that cool, your options are to manually check all five sites for updates or just read your email.

You can use RSS/Atom as a substitute if you want, but I think most people recognized long ago that feed readers are basically read-only email clients with slightly better organizational capabilities (and that is variable depending on which two products you choose to compare).

Instant messaging falls into this same pattern when people try to use it for non-instant communication. Consider a system that IMs you when there is new content on a wiki page you are monitoring. Unless that wiki page is your #1 priority right now, your attention to this page will be queued and dealt with later. Since it’s in an IM window, you presumably need to put it somewhere for future reference. This is why you see Sametime clients with tabs for chats, and people who keep Sametime chats open all day in those tabs. They are essentially recreating their email client in Sametime – the tabs are just threads.

I think the real opportunity for innovation lies in trying to enhance email clients, not in trying to re-invent asynchronous electronic messages. Google did offer some new ideas in GMail, although I’ve been using it since the beginning and don’t consider it epic or anything. But at least they have the right focus. Wave is just another attempt to replace email with something that will eventually become email; they should instead focus on better ways to integrate email content with non-email resources to make people more productive with the information they receive (a tiny but helpful example is the way GMail tries to show you a map of addresses it finds in your email).