Google Wave

Can someone please explain Google Wave to me? I got my invite a couple days ago and I have been playing around with it and inviting friends to play with me, but I cannot figure out for the life of me what purpose it serves!

I somewhat understand what it can do… essentially a collaboration suite which can serve multiple purposes, but really what problem does it solve? There are already a zillion applications which do similar things – Google Docs will allow collaboration on documents, any 1/2 way modern calendar application will allow you to create and share events with friends. I can’t see how it will make a good IM solution since you have to be signed into the site to use it, there is no desktop or push notification; I’m finding that friends are now sending me IM messages to say “check your wave” so that I go and see what new IM they posted.

I’m going to keep playing with it and see if I can figure out some neat purpose for it, but if anyone can point me in the right direction please feel free to leave me a comment!