I had a good look at it a couple of weeks ago.
From a business perspective, I think it's got a lot of potential. Likewise, for education and group work - lots going for it.
For me, it's like the next evolutionary step for email. You have your list of "waves" which are containers for a project/conversation/group.
For our company for example. A customer creates a wave asking for a quote for 2000 M2 of cladding material. As part of the wave, we issue a quote and add images of cladding panels we think would suit. The customer calls (using an app that will be developed to integrate Skype or something) asking for clarification on fixing details. We give it, and he goes with product X. He issues the purchase order under the wave, and we issue a customer order. When the product is delivered, we add in the haulier to the wave to give details of delivery. We issue an invoice and statement onto the wave. Three months later, the customer complains the panel won't stay up (we never have this :roll: ). He places pictures of the problem on the wave and asks for our technical expert to visit site. He adds a meeting to the wave with a map of directions, working regs for the site, etc. Our expert goes on site and takes his own photos and adds them to the wave, and annotates that the fixing instructions weren't followed correctly. Customer pays up (yeah, right) and issues a remittance advice on the wave.
Lengthy example of some of the end to end ways it could work in a business flow. At the moment, we have a lot of people making separate emails over the same subject, calls on it, photos attached to it all, etc. Wave could bring all of that together under a single, quantifiable "conversation". There is openness and traceability. It's actually a great way of doing business (if everyone is on Wave and the apps are there.
My problem with it is that it's trivialised, and marketed to the wrong people. One of the best business tools to emerge since email, is being sold to the "social networking" fans. The most prevalent type of app for it so far? Games!
This is why it's going to be a hard sell into business. It's a business app, I can't see many people using it to replace their social networking favourite (it just doesn't do what Myspace, Facebook or Twitter do). However, it seems to be being sold as a cool new "serious" social networking thing - which is not what it is at all (in my view).
I'm still withholding final verdict for a while, but I can see massive advantages to getting everyone using it...