It let's you collaborate with a group of people in real time. You can work on things together, chat, etc. There's a good video floating around somewhere out there. Cheers
Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Try it http://wave.google.com/
I still don't understand what the benefits of google wave are. I signed up and got accepted to the beta, but can't seem to grasp how it's different than simply emailing. Yeah, you can post a poll, but who needs that anyway?
Google Wave is an online software application product of Google, described as a "personal communication and collaboration tool". It was first announced at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. It has a strong collaborative and real-time focus supported by extensions that can provide, for example, spelling/grammar checking, automated translation among 40 languages,and numerous other extensions. Initially released only to developers, a preview release of Google Wave was extended to 100,000 users in September 2009, each allowed to invite additional users. On the 29th of November 2009, Google accepted most requests submitted soon after the extended release of the technical preview in September 2009.