I work at home these days, so communication with my coworkers is a big deal. There's definitely a place for this tool in my toolbox of work related communications systems.

Outside of that? I don't really expect to use it much. I could replace e-mail with this, except that the network effects of having darn near everybody (not just of my friends, but of the whole planet) on e-mail already vs. a few thousand (or, be generous, tens or hundreds of thousands) people on Wave... no contest.

Even for work, I don't expect this to take over e-mail or even be a day-to-day tool - just one more useful thing to have around.

I'm not sure I'd use Wave to replace email, or casual chat, but I can see some niches.

I've worked places where we've kept a long-running (a year or more) group text chat (lately on Skype) for coordination. We drop files on that and exchange things now and then. It doesn't really organize itself though, it's just a year-long log.

Perhaps we'd get more out of Wave for that.

I'm not sure how well wave would work for larger groups, with numbers in the hundreds or thousands. If it does work there, I could see it peeling users off sites like "outdoor clubs" or "investors forums."

Will blogish sites like OTB outsource the conversation to Wave at some point? That would be an interesting direction. I've been considering some time how conversation pools could be bigger than the sites to which they make contact.

I've been working on Wave since they opened the sandbox server this summer.

It is basically really good for collaborative projects--you can drag/drop files right into a wave and collaborate in real-time.

There are many enterprise settings where it will be useful; for general consumer use, it will be a specialized app for certain tasks.