@George - I am honored to know that you checked WiZiQ to learn about Wave!
I am using Wave for the last few days but haven't got the privilege of inviting anyone yet.
The following is for the little bit geeky types: Although Wave, as users see it, is only one application of the 'Wave' technology, there are a lot of potential applications of it. For instance, WiZiQ Virtual Classroom can be built using Wave too (some time in the future when it can support more advanced features). It is the 'protocol' of Wave that really interests Google.
Back to what Wave is for the 'rest of us': Its discussions in real time. Think of it as WiZiQ Discussions as this one, but that you can see me typing my post letter-by-letter even with back spaces and deletes. Then recording the whole thing on a time line and playing it back step by step. This, and take a step further - allow tools to embed inside the text - like in blogs - such as a YouTube video, Google Maps, a Sudoku widget with one difference (from blogs): users of it can interact in real time, like in the WiZiQ virtual Classroom. E.g. say in this discussion I embed a Google Map widget that shows the map of the USA with a couple of location pins on LA and San Francisco. Now if you were online too, you could interact with the same map adding more location pins while I see you do it on my screen.
Putting it a bit differently, it is discussion board experience mixed with real time experience in the same application.
Now, the use of it: I am not sure. For one, I don't like someone watching me type (typos, poor English, Grammar etc.) before I hit 'Submit'. Two, it might look cool and all, but I couldn't see much of a benefit over discussion boards and blogs. I sincerely hope that developers use it to build some real useful applications and it's not just a Google gimmick because they couldn't get their hands on Twitter and Facebook (which work on real-time feeds, a target use case of Wave).
As mentioned above, a real virtual classroom can also be built using the Wave technology but it has a few shortcomings over Flash (which is what we use) especially since it's dependent on HTML4:
1. No direct upload of images possible (can do by installing Google Gears in your browser).
2. HTML text is not as rich as the one you see in Flash.
3. You will still need an outside plugin for audio-video communication such as Google Talk or Skype.
4. Free-hand will not be much smooth until the Wave protocol advances more.
The above shortcomings are supposed to go away with the new version of HTML
If anyone finds better uses of Wave, especially for education, I would love to hear.
I hope it helps.
Regards,
Harman