Google Wave is on the lips of countless Google watchers today as the search monopoly announced a unique concept for online interaction. 
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.

Google Wave is being previewed for developers today at the Google I/O conference in Mountain View. The keynote presentation will be available later today at which time I will see about adding it to this posting.
May 29 Update: the Google Wave Introductory video can be found here.