"We did that Chaser-type thing of publicly dissing him and then asking questions later," Morrow said. Although Rasmussen struggled to offer a succinct explanation of Wave to the Chaser's Craig Reucassel during the interview, it gave Reucassel an idea. "The next day we were doing some collaborative writing for our new iPhone and iPad app and Craig said 'Maybe we should give Wave a go,'" Morrow said. "Since then we've been using Wave for quite a lot of Chaser's content. We sent Lars a slightly sheepish email, having paid the crap out of it," Morrow said. Morrow said the Chaser team had been using a mix of email and Skype to share material, but found Wave to be "a pretty good all-in-one substitute" for creating and editing content, and polling the popularity of different headline ideas between team members.

Wave is like a combination of email and instant messaging. It was built to foster the sharing of rich content such as documents, maps, images and video for any group endeavour, and the Chaser team are not the first to question its complexity. When it was first suggested to Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2007, he said he thought Wave sounded "kind of crazy". Although Brin now firmly believes in its future, its launch has not had a smooth ride, said Rasmussen, who is a senior engineer at Google Australia. "We had a lot of interest after we first showed a demo and then when we got it out into peoples' hands there was a fair bit of disappointment because it didn't change the world overnight. "It was very immature – buggy and crashy and slow. But primarily it was new and people didn't quite know what to do with it." Rasmussen said Wave was tested out by 5 million people during its beta preview phase and retained 1 million active users who began "waves" of conversation on all manner of subjects ranging from a youth debate on climate change to a brunch club collaborating with members over future breakfast venues.

"We find it good because you can actually insert replies and comments paragraph by paragraph. So you can try a gag a different way, put little edits in, and you can tell when everyone has read it," Morrow said. "Within a posting you can have a voting box so you can see if that headline has three 'yes' votes and that others haven't seen it," he said. As for its complexity, he said none of the team found it hard to get to grips with it once they started using it, even though some team members were less than tech savvy. "We run the gamut from early adopters that put Madonna and Angelina Jolie to shame, to people who are still using Claris Works from 1972," he said. Although adoption of the tool has been limited by its invitation-only status, Google opened up the application to the public two weeks ago.

"I predict The Chaser will be even funnier in the future and I am perfectly prepared to take credit for that," Rasmussen said.