Live-typing illustrates Wave’s bigger problem: In many cases, the software creates new headaches by attempting to fix aspects of online communication that don’t need fixing. What is Wave? Its designers say that it’s an effort to modernize e-mail by adding features from IM, wikis, and other tools for collaborating in the Web age. Improving e-mail is a worthy goal: There’s too much of it, a lot of the mail we get is useless (even the stuff that’s not spam), and threads involving more than two or three people can get wildly, incomprehensibly out of hand. But Wave tries to fix these problems by replacing e-mail with an entirely alien interface that isn’t very intuitive and that introduces new problems of its own.