I've found campfire + internal wiki or threaded messageboard to cover most of the usecases in the article.
Also the UI around threading in Wave is awful from a usability perspective. It's nearly impossible to tell if you're creating a sibling or a child until you've done a lot of experimentation. The affordances are extremely unclear.
And without email notification or other kinds of client support, Wave has become yet another site I have to check every day.. I got sucked into a wave planning a family reunion and I forgot to check it for a few weeks, and I missed all kinds of activity. Even then it was a jumble since all the users had difficulty grasping the concepts, and missing replies to earlier threads.
Every once in a long while I need to collaborate on some sort of document with my coworkers, but the vast majority of the time I just want chat.
As you point out, Wave's UI is horrible for chat. That's why we're building http://shoptalkapp.com; it's similar to Campfire. We use it every day and couldn't live without it. It's like a virtual office.
what's the benefit of the integration? the transient back and forth conversations of a debate don't need to be co-located with the longer-lived artifacts-- the signal/noise ratio would probably actually harm effective communication.
I actually wonder, on a highly trafficked Wave with many subthreads, if the OP doesn't have trouble figuring out which parts are relevant and need to be promoted or flagged as a more authoritative/final artifact of a discussion, and which are just unproductive tangents? (especially since Wave doesn't let you reparent your comment if you've accidentally put it at the wrong hierarchy level. It also doesn't let you delete comments! wtf?)
Also the UI around threading in Wave is awful from a usability perspective. It's nearly impossible to tell if you're creating a sibling or a child until you've done a lot of experimentation. The affordances are extremely unclear.
And without email notification or other kinds of client support, Wave has become yet another site I have to check every day.. I got sucked into a wave planning a family reunion and I forgot to check it for a few weeks, and I missed all kinds of activity. Even then it was a jumble since all the users had difficulty grasping the concepts, and missing replies to earlier threads.