Troy Brumley spots what may well be the biggest problem with Google Wave:

The people I've invited are viewing Wave as IM, meanwhile I'm viewing Wave as a middle ground between Sharepoint and wikis.  Either we're all missing the metaphor or Wave doesn't have one.

I think he's on to something there. So far as I can tell, Wave is neither fish nor fowl - it's kind of like IM, but doesn't really operate as IM. It's got some wiki like features as well, but it's not really that, either.

There's another probem with it too, I think. In the default configuration, you not only see that other people are typing, you see what they are typing. This leads to two problems:

• It's pretty slow
• It's very difficult to rethink something you started to say

In an IM or email system, if you think better of something you wrote, you erase and start over (until you hit send). With Wave, that "yeah, I'm done" step goes away - it's like speech, but without any of the body language or voice cues that help you out. I think that may be the biggest problem Wave has, and I'm not sure that it can be overcome...

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