Wave looks, at first, like an in-browser instant messaging tool. It's a multi-user tool, too, so you can quickly have a conversation with an entire team. Unlike other IM tools, Wave lets you see each letter as it's typed, and replies can start before you've finished typing. That makes it much more like a real-world conversation, but it can also be disconcerting — especially if you're accustomed to editing your text while you collect your thoughts. Fortunately there's an option to use a draft mode to hide your edits until you're ready to send them to the rest of the wave's participants.
There are plenty of formatting tools, so you can use a wave to build a document collaboratively. More than one participant can edit the same wavelet — with no locks, just an indicator to show where everyone is typing. You probably wouldn't share a Wave-created document outside the flow of conversation without reformatting and editing it, but it's a good way to get started, or to get feedback from a geographically distributed team. Waves are managed by a server that operates in two parts: the server, which handles communication with end users and other Wave servers; and the store, which manages the content of both local and remote waves.
Google is touting Wave as one of the first HTML 5 applications and it needs support for new tags that only come with what Google calls 'modern browsers'. That means Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox and Google's own Chrome (which also takes advantage of the built-in Gears tools to boost Wave's performance by handling local data storage and multi-threaded JavaScript operations). You can use Wave with Internet Explorer if you install Google's new Chrome Frame plugin, which adds HTML5 and other open web technologies to Microsoft's browser.
