Actually I think the master plan is to switch GMail to use Google Wave (note that the demo looks almost exactly like GMail- except better). Suddenly you have a bazillion Wave users. Developers would love to target all these users. Developers start generating lots of different kinds of waves. Email is no longer lame- you can create a custom wave robot to augment your email client however you please. An Mp3 wave, a document sharing wave, a Go game wave, a Hacker News wave, a realtime peer coding wave... Hopefully this will inspire the open source community to set up non Google hosted wave servers and services.

Google Wave also seems like it might be a solid scalable technology on which to build P2P streams.

I work on an open source meta-web project called ShiftSpace. The Google Wave server looks like the perfect backend for what we're working on.

I haven't watched the keynote yet - is Gmail -> Google Wave something they announced?

Pure speculation.

I'm guessing you did not see the keynote or the talk about wave extensions, gadgets, and robots. Wave is a super aggregator, and I expect it will not be another nuisance to check.

Think of wave as a mashup of iGoogle and Gmail on steroids, with supreme customizability.

The recent explosion of labs in Gmail is a hint of what will be coming as developers sink their teeth into wave.

Disclaimer: I attended Google IO and saw the demo. I may have had some Google koolaid without my knowledge.

You need aggregation! Here, let me help:

Use iGoogle. RSS+email. If that's too cluttered for your tastes, use Google Reader separately. In my system, RSS is for bulk while email is for specifics.

Twitter: RSS the feeds you care about, have personal tweets go to your cell. No more checking twitter.

Facebook: Use the mobile feature for things you really care about, and email for the less important things. They don't allow RSS for their news feed, so if you care about that... you're mostly out of luck :(

Bug tracker: Email + RSS. Works very well.

Hacker news: RSS.

Also, bonus tip for email: Your cell has it's own email address. Use filters to forward important email to your cell. The message will get chopped, and you will only receive who it's from, the subject, and a couple of words from the body. This reduces the amount of checking you'll have to do, since all the important stuff is taken care of.

Thanks for your help :-)

What I meant wasn't "I have to check all these pages separately instead of checking iGoogle or FriendFeed". What I meant was "this could potentially be yet another communications channel for people to reach my eyeballs, and I'm sick of new communications channels".

I'm with you on that. I'm trying to think of a way to tweak Gmail so so stuff from mailing lists can sit in my inbox long enough to be noticed but then be quietly auto-archived if I haven't looked at it after 24 hours. About half of what I receive ought to come with an expiry date.Also...er, [redacted].

I think you're wrong, just because it'd be easy for Wave provider's to legacy-support email/SMTP: just dump incoming emails into your Wave Inbox, flag it, so if you answer it, it is sent back over SMTP. Or let Wave users append to it like a regular wave message, but the user has the option to send it back to the originator as a HTML email. Sounds doable.

More interestingly, given the fact that developers can write apps against the API, this may have a non-trivial intersection with social networking, meaning this could be a competitor to sites like Facebook, Myspace, etc.