Google Wave: It's innovative, but is it truly useful?

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139701/Google_Wave_It_s_innovative_but_is_it_truly_useful_?taxonomyId=16&pageNumber=1
"Currently in a controlled beta that everyone wants to try out, Google Wave has enormous potential -- and serious limitations"(Preston Gralla). Just what is this google wave? Google Wave is a new collaborative tool that works in real-time, and has the potential to be an ideal way for members of a group to work with one another. Think of it as a mashup of threaded e-mail conversations and instant messaging, on steroids; It has Rich content, including Google maps, interactive polling, videos and more, that can all be embedded directly in to your conversations (called waves). This apears to be an incredible tool to use in the work place, and for recreation. Your waves can be public or private. Only people you've invited to a private wave can view it or participate in it, while anyone can view or participate in a public wave. You need to be extremely careful about what waves you make public. During beta testing, a serious security hole was found, one of a persons private waves was turned into a public wave without their knowledge. They had added the Bloggy gadget to a wave, but because the gadget didn't ask for any log-in or blog information, they assumed that the wave was not published as a blog. It wasn't, but the gadget made the wave public without telling them. They only learned that the wave had been made public when someone They didn't know joined it and warned Them that the wave had gone public. Although, for a service built for communication, it's surprising how much of an island Google Wave is; it doesn't even integrate with Gmail, much less other mail clients and services. There also are no links to social networking sites or instant messaging tools, suprisingly, not even Google Talk. I think that this sounds like a wonderful tool to use, not just for fun, but also to take the place of e-mailing back and forth. What would have taken days is now mere minutes. That saves alot of time, and time is money. I like the general idea of this but so many people are set in their ways that i do not believe that this will be a very popular item for anyones fork day for much except fun. Like its name, i believe Google wave is just that, a wave. It can come to a towering peak, but all waves come crashing down eventually.