Initiative

What Google Wave didn't solve or achieve

Google Wave is getting more & more like a bloatware. Buggy interface, boring discussions in and out of with:public, lags even under Chrome. Here's my list of real innovations that can be done, for a 21st century email systems:

1. Email as identity. Paypal & Alipay are good examples. But it not just payment methods that can be considered as an identity. Lots of innovations can be done here.
2. Simplified, standardized and instant verification. I don't how many of you guys have found out that, most of the legit emails you receive everyday are activation, verification from websites, forums and stuff. Why can't this kind of email be standardized? You know if the activation URL field is a property from a activation instance, we can use scripting for a series of batch & automated activation, how awesome is that! If you write a simple XMPP bot you can be activated instantly without any extra clicking. Once activation is standardized, it can prevent lots of phishing, too. Because you don't have to looking for the right URL from a messy formated HTML email content.
3. Notifications. It's like activation emails but cooler. Calendar applications can be integrated as part of it. The most important technology here is how to archive, fulltext searchable and digestible. Think how great it is, if you receive 3-4 youtube comments email daily, but you can read the aggregated and digested version of comments in the weekend. An automatied machine learning algorithm that semantically rips off greeting words and list only the meaningful items you cared about.
4. Contact import with manners and less hack. Admit it, in the past we hack into other's MSN or Yahoo! mail for a fucking contact list, with a password in fucking plaintext the owner gratefully granted to us. We use a lousy HTML parser and extract the contact list. The worst part is, how many times has a maillist received something like Jim has invited you to use Google Talk? Is it really hard to segregate human contacts from websites no-reply's or maillists? Email is nice enough to be a general messaging system but it gets really annoying when it's too primary. Contacts should not only be categorized and labeled, but also means one can tell it's a real person/virtual identity or not programmatically. Yes this is not really email's fault and it can be solved with oAuth, I just think it's worthy to point it out.
5. GTD. Chandler tried this and failed. Outlook succeeded.
6. PIM, PKM and stuff.
7. Business intelligence, life streaming, and workflow automated.
8. Protocol wise. At least do not use plaintext protocols or everyone can fuck with
9. Decentralized and versioned. Something like GIT I guess.
10. Updated: Consistency. Look at the following scenario: You forgot your Gmail password, you check the forgot password options, and it requires your old @aol.com secondary email account for verification. But, you abandoned the @aol.com email years ago and deleted everything. Now your Gmail.com could never comeback unless bureaucratic contact & explanation with Gmail admins. What if you have a important attachment locked in your Gmail, or a business letter, your PGP signed permanently with this Gmail account, or anything urgent. We need a new reliable and secure mechanism for transferring chained Email verifications, because the email is vital infrastructure of the Internet for consistency.

Google Wave looks fancy at first glance, but who will use a crap that can hardly scroll with merely 300+ replies? They are just heavily focusing on a interface that are doomed to fail and missed the real innovative & strategically important aspect of email.