Google needs to do two things with the GWT client UI:
1) clear up the confusion between collaboration spaces and conversation spaces, by making each wave have one collaboration space at the top and conversation space below it;
2) confine live typing and editing of the contributions of others to the collaboration space.
I wouldn't apply these same strictures to gadgets necessarily.
Also, they need to stop trying to use the Wave brand to mean two things. It's stuck as the name of this one client experience; the protocol should get an acronym or something.
Yup. This nails it. The biggest problem with wave is I think they took it just one baby step too far in abstraction. The thing needs to clearly separate these two uses (collaboration, conversation), and all of my main gripes of the thing will disappear. Not sure of the best way (one could imagine a fixed layout as you suggest, another way would be to allow users to filter things more easily, whatever) but without this Waves (at least, the big ones) degrade to the least-common-denominator of the various use cases: chat rooms.
1) clear up the confusion between collaboration spaces and conversation spaces, by making each wave have one collaboration space at the top and conversation space below it;
2) confine live typing and editing of the contributions of others to the collaboration space.
I wouldn't apply these same strictures to gadgets necessarily.
Also, they need to stop trying to use the Wave brand to mean two things. It's stuck as the name of this one client experience; the protocol should get an acronym or something.