2 Essential features for Google Wave clients

Google Wave looks to be a very impressive and promising product, continuing in Google's tradition of supporting open protocols on the internet. Wave has the potential to become an easy replacement for many use cases of email, IM, and social networking services like Facebook and Twitter.

But to truly succeed and give users the full control they currently have in email and IM (and in most other Google services), client applications will need to be a bit richer than those shown in the initial demos.

Wave clients will need:

• The ability to handle multiple accounts, much like 3rd-party email and IM clients do today. I know very few people with only one email or IM account. The reasons vary... work vs. personal, legacy addresses, branding and identity, spam control, etc., but it won't be too long before people start having more than one Wave-capable account and need a way to aggregate them. Particularly since Wave may well take the place of (or at least augment) other forms of social communication and collaboration, this aggregation within the client will quickly become critical.

• A POP-like ability to download and locally store waves. Maybe this is accomplished through something like Google Gears offline access, but ideally it's something more open and interoperable like a subset of Wave server features being implemented in the client. Clearly, many larger companies will want to run their own Wave servers rather than use a commercial service. But individuals and smaller organizations will also want local offline content. Otherwise their content is at the mercy of a commercial service in the cloud staying operational, not losing data, and not locking them out of their account for whatever reason. Most intelligent people keep multiple copies of important content, including a local copy. Wave conversations are no different.

Many people will simply use a browser-based Wave interface much of the time (and of course this is anticipated to be a key vector for Google and others to monetize the service), but if Wave is to become a significant means through which we direct our online attention, it will need to have the at least the same degrees of flexibility and robustness that we have enjoyed with email and IM clients.