XMPP is only the connection part of the Wave - the other, if not more complex then at least much less understood part, is http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepaper

XMPP is only the connection part of the Wave - the other, if not more complex then at least much less understood part, is http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transform http://www.waveprotocol.org/whitepapers/operational-transfor... which is a theory about how to change a document according to concurrent editing commands streams. The idea is that using a special document structure and operations you can emulate the interface of any communication application (in email that document is a thread of conversation with rules allowing people append new 'emails', irc channels can be similarly represented with the document being the channel 'screen', you can even represent a chess game as a series of editing of the chess board). This generality let's you mix and match freely the communication modes used in different communication tools (like wiki and im etc).