You can look at it is a collaborative document editor, but the fact that the developers intend for it to be used for day to day communication is important. It means that they will make sure it does all the little things a communication tool needs to do.
Most importantly, the waves (documents) are structured as threaded discussions. Users have global, unique, human readable addresses. Access to waves and parts of waves can be controlled per-person. There is an an inbox that lists waves by time. It keeps track of which ones have unseen content and notifies you when a change is made, and so on.
I don't think any mere mortal can get a good sense of what Wave is without seeing it in action. I didn't really wrap my head around it until I had spent a couple of hours using it.
Most importantly, the waves (documents) are structured as threaded discussions. Users have global, unique, human readable addresses. Access to waves and parts of waves can be controlled per-person. There is an an inbox that lists waves by time. It keeps track of which ones have unseen content and notifies you when a change is made, and so on.
I don't think any mere mortal can get a good sense of what Wave is without seeing it in action. I didn't really wrap my head around it until I had spent a couple of hours using it.