waving not drowning

Definitely not drowning, in fact, as the number of my friends on Google Wave is still exceptionally small. The invitations seem to take many days to get through...

The original fuss about Wave was around the merging of email and instant messaging. Personally, now I'm actually using it a little, all this seems to give me is a confusing, messy interface. The key elements I think may make this a really interesting system are open federation - the ability to run your own server and keep your data out of the Google monolith - and bots, which are already appearing, and offer a wide range of functions.

A recent workshop with senior academics at the University highlighted email administration as a key challenge, with a "virtual PA" being the ultimate technology advance sought ("as smart as someone with a PhD in my field"), and I can imagine Wave, with a range of quality bots to deliver filtering, automatic responses and so on, delivering part of this quite soon.

In the meantime, back to waving by myself...