This reminds me of something most new communication media seem not to realize: no matter how fancy your new thing is, not everyone will want to try it initially, so for God's sake make it bridge to email. Otherwise it will become a ghetto.
I don't think the Wave people understood this; if they had, Wave might have turned out differently.
Asana, on the other hand, made a big deal out of this.
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This reminds me of something most new communication media seem not to realize: no matter how fancy your new thing is, not everyone will want to try it initially, so for God's sake make it bridge to email. Otherwise it will become a ghetto.
I don't think the Wave people understood this; if they had, Wave might have turned out differently.
Asana, on the other hand, made a big deal out of this.
Making something bridge to email doesn't seem terribly difficult. SMTP is; as the name would imply, simple. (At least it seems simple.)
To be a true bridge you need to be bidirectional: to do that you'd need IMAP, not SMTP. IMAP is a bit of a stateful mess of a protocol, unfortunately.