Google Wave's underlying technology will not only enable collaboration with other people, it also make it possible for bots to interact with what you've written. I think this is going to change the way we work. E.g., all applications which require a significant amount of typing will benefit from the statistical auto-correction provided by the Wave app Spelly. In effect, Spelly goes over the text as you're typing it and correcting the obvious mistakes, just as you would do a bit later.
In a similar vein, the proof-of-concept bot Igor is watching out for inserted references and automagically converts them to a citation and a reference list. When writing papers, I usually insert reminders: "REF Imming review", "REF PMID 16007907". If I adjust this convention a bit and provide a bit more detail, Igor can figure out by itself which paper is meant and fetch the citation. Google Wave and Igor save me the tiresome going back-and-forth between a reference manager and the editor to insert all the citation, and they remove distractions from the process of writing and editing the paper.
Of course, this is a proof of concept, so the style can't yet be customized. I further think it would be helpful to quickly look "what's inside" a particular citation. I don't know if Google Wave supports this, but it would be nice to click on a citation ("[23]") and be presented with a pop-up window showing not only infos about the article, but also links to PubMed / a DOI resolver.
