Wave propagation
So yeah, Google Wave can be confusing, and certainly isn’t sufficiently dense in the average social/thinking circle to have been useful yet to, say, me.
But I am impressed by its potential as a platform for prototyping new collaborative workflows. There are already some intriguing demos. I think this is fertile ground and wonder what else might blossom?
See, I think this kind of application is very hard to develop from the ground up - but Wave gives you a framework for delta-based multi-party editing, a network of users running clients to embed the widget housing your great idea, and perhaps most importantly, all the other multimedia communication channels that you have to surround the key interaction with to make it work the best it can. (The old chestnut is that useful software grows features until it can read e-mail; I suspect contemporary group-think apps will prove to have IRC-envy.)
