…live typing is one of those Cool Demo Features that looks really awesome when showing off the app. Features like that can be dangerous because they are legitimately very useful during the app’s gestation, when exciting demos are a key survival trait; but then they can’t be removed later on because they’re so well-known, even if they turn out to be useless. Sometimes these features aren’t actually harmful to the user experience, they just make the code more complex and harder to maintain. Instant typing is both, unfortunately.

You are correct in that Wave is something of an open framework, and it will be interesting to see what people make of it. If anything, it probably won’t end up being used exactly as Google is proposing (much as Twitter has turned into something very different than it was originally envisioned as). I do think it has value as a tool for collaboration, but find it overly complex for simple communication. And if you’re just going to pare it way down so it’s the same as IM or e-mail, why not save all the work and just use IM or e-mail?

You don’t have to let other people see you type- that’s a UI issue, not a platform issue.

I’d also be hesitant to see Google’s Wave as something that’s going to get a lot of traction. The early reviews of it have been horrible, ranging from “impressive but useless” (here), and “too complicated for its own good” (here), to calling it “the Segway of email” (here). I thought this was a particularly good article, decrying the visibility of your message in Wave as you type it, and how that tends to inhibit writers. The article does note that Wave is an extremely useful tool for corporate collaboration, but that’s a long way from the “e-mail replacement” it’s been touted as. Given Google’s propensity for abandoning projects that don’t catch on, we’ll have to wait and see whether Wave continues to roll on toward the shore.