I had my first useful experience with Google Wave recently. A team of five people needed to collectively find a solution that fit our disparate interests. IM wasn’t going to work with this many people. Group chat would make finding the log a pain and tracking the threads difficult. A wiki or forum didn’t move fast enough when we had momentum.
Wave let us shift between real-time and asynchronous communication. Finding the information we created is as easy as finding something in Gmail. We could have threaded discussions and maintain a group-editable post with a summary.
Besides of having us all in one location with a whiteboard, Wave was a good option.
Wanted: A better way to think and communicate visually in Wave.
PS: Need a Wave invite? Direct message me on Twitter, I still have a few.