With Priority Inbox, every message in Gmail has two buttons next to it. “Important” and “Not important”. By default, most messages seem to be unimportant. However, as you flag important emails, Gmail will look for patterns and start automatically determining which future messages are important. Important unread emails appear in a special pane at the top of your inbox.

It’s a really simple idea, the sort of thing that makes you wonder why nobody tried it before; we’ve had similar technology in spam filters for eons! Email power users have been sorting their email for important messages via filters for the past however-many years, but Google’s solution is much better from a usability standpoint. How many average users even go to set up a filter in Gmail? I’d be surprised if it were more than maybe one in ten or twenty. Now, the filter comes to them. There needs to be more software that adapts to the user, rather than vice versa.

I have mixed feeling about this. Wave was absolutely fantastic for collaborating on projects. It was a huge hit with my campus ACM group; we used it to outline presentations, plan the setup for a new computer lab, as a makeshift IRC channel, and on a software engineering project or two.

It’s not that we couldn’t have used other tools. Wave could be slow and buggy, after all. But the idea of having this all bundled together in a single tool was just better. It made it really easy to start a project and get everyone on board easily, without having to fool around with some combination of Google Docs and email and IRC.

On the other hand, since I graduated, I’ve used Wave perhaps three times. I don’t have any projects to do, so it’s utility is limited. The general public is in a similar situation and doesn’t have much of a use for Wave either; it’s a really great really specialized tool.

You know how Twitter used to be down all the time, but now it still goes down and is really glitchy to boot, but we love it anyway? That’s pretty much how I feel about Wave.

On the plus side, it’s not like all the functionality will be completely gone. There’s always Analogue and Google Docs. But I’ll miss the integration and the ease of tossing together a group of people together in a virtual room. Without email.

Wave is for groups You can use it as a one-on-one communication tool, but it’s overkill. Nonetheless, it’s used for individual comms. The hesitation level for sending a message seems to be lower; only slightly higher than instant messaging. The barrier to add 3rd parties is also much lower; most two-party waves I’ve engaged in don’t stay that way for long. We’re rather social creatures, really.

Each wave has a structural limit I didn’t see this one coming, but it’s true. Once a wave passes about 150 posts, it is discarded and people start a new one. This seems to be for two reasons.

First, the Wave client turns to molasses in January at critical mass. Not an issue. It’s just software; clever people can fix it and Google has plenty of clever people.

Second, long waves are just harder to read. There may be useful information, but the signal to noise ratio just isn’t worth it. There’s this human element to it. You can edit other people’s documents, but editing and deleting other people’s conversations just feels wrong somehow. Wiki developers have figured this out and adapted by clearly distinguishing between articles and discussion while still maintaining a unity between them. Word processors have attempted to resolve the issue by using annotations. I suspect part of the problem here is that there’s often no clear distinction between what is raw information and what is not.

So, yep. Wave is right there with Wiki as far as exciting collaboration tools go. Just a few scaling issues right now.