I think people who say it's pointless have a disturbing lack of vision. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people were saying email was pointless when they they could only email two or three people. What about when everyone is on it? It sure beats email and IM from what I've seen so far.
As for the usual digs at Google (I heard the same when gmail was first around), Wave isn't like using Facebook to communicate with people - it might be a website at the moment, but in the future it's a network of public and private servers + native clients as well as web access. Sure, Google might get info from people that use it's servers, but that's not a reason to avoid the system forever.
As for my impressions, there are some issues:
The user-interface being ugly and slow. It's particularly sluggish on FF and doesn't work at all in IE. I'm sure it runs well on Chrome, but requiring everyone to use a particular browser is the definition of a 'boil the ocean' strategy.
Some things I think are ill-concieved such as the fact that everything is editable. Sometimes you want collaborative editing of a document, but a lot of time you just want threaded replies. Editability is something the author of a post should have to enable.
At the moment there are some limitations that should be overcome eventually. One is that there's no such thing as public waves that anyone can add to. One idea I had when I first saw the presentation is that it would be a good replacement for blog comments if each post on your blog was a wave and then people would add comments as blips to it. They would then be able to see right in their inbox if any further discussion took place (with the ability to hide the wave if they were no longer interested). That's not possible atm because of the limited permissions model. What if a forum such as Channel9's coffee house was essentially just a collection of waves? Found an interesting thread - instead of emailing a friend a link you can send them the actual wave direct into their inbox. Make a comment in a forum you don't use very often but still want to see when it's updated? Wave could help there too.
Overall, I'm still pretty enthusiastic about the possibilities for a federated real-time collaboration protocol, but both the client and the server side still need some work.
WindowsClient: New WPF Showcase Addition: Enterprise
