The "see you typing" thing disappeared to a large extent from IM clients because it was horrible. Users don't like other people seeing their "thoughts" and it creates a much stronger pressure to formulate/complete an immediate answer.
And the "robot" thing is just inane - it's not like bots are hard to interface with e-mail or with the web; it's just that at the current level few bots are very interesting beyond the very basic (IRC type) bots that keep track of when people last were around etc.
Wave looks interesting, but because it provides distributed/federated group chat / document editing / collaboration more than it competes with e-mail.
I'd be much more inclined to see it as an alternative to (some) wiki's and project collaboration tools like Basecamp than to e-mail.
And the "robot" thing is just inane - it's not like bots are hard to interface with e-mail or with the web; it's just that at the current level few bots are very interesting beyond the very basic (IRC type) bots that keep track of when people last were around etc.
Wave looks interesting, but because it provides distributed/federated group chat / document editing / collaboration more than it competes with e-mail.
I'd be much more inclined to see it as an alternative to (some) wiki's and project collaboration tools like Basecamp than to e-mail.