Wave is a web based service and platform designed to merge email, instant messaging, wiki's, and social networking so they can be collaborative and real time. With things like automatic spelling and grammar checking, translation between 40 languages it's designed as the "next generation" of email. Waves are shared collaborations that can be added to or removed at any point during a wave's existence. Instead of sending a message and its entire thread of previous messages or requiring all responses to be stored in each user's inbox for context, objects known as waves contain a complete thread of all forms of messages and are stored on a central server. Google Wave is a project by Google, you can watch a video on it here from the Google I/O conference in May. Mashable link about Google Wave
