What is Wave?

Well – to quote from Google:

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

It is going to be in developer preview for a while, so expect some changes to occur, but looks like it’s going to be big and open-source with a full developer API and toolkits to develop your own apps based on the Wave protocol.

I don’t suppose Big G will be buying Twitter now.

Full details at the Official Google Blog