Google Wave: Potential Problems and Benefits

Google has announced yesterday what could welcome become a new email, a program, API and most importantly: a new protocol - Google Wave.One of the things I like about it, is its seamless merging of email and IM into one convenient easy to use interface, with threads, multiple participants, private messages and image attachments. All this operated from any browser that supports HTML 5. Firefox, Chrome and Safari were shown (now love for IE?). Another cool feature is that when in IM mode every letter is transmitted as you type, therefore no need to hit send for your other party to see the message. Conveniently, for people with a lot of typos or clutterred drafty style, this can be disabled.Now to the negatives. The whole thing is hosted, so Google "pawns ur dataz". Well, if you are using Gmail or any online email, it's already hosted, so no big deal there. Plus the whole Wave thing is open source, so anyone can host it.For me to uninstall my Skype, wave has to have two more things: audio and video conversations. Google Talk already has it. Will these two be merged, remains to be seen. A recent unveiling of Google Voice brings even more potential to have all your chat, email and phone communication in one place.It could be the next big revolution after email... if not Google Wave than something similar definitely!