The product, called Google Sites, was built on technology from Google acquisition JotSpot (though it looks and acts more like a Google application than anything JotSpot ever released).
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What's it good for? I'd say the best place to start is to use it to build a small business intranet. Sign-up using your company's domain (it won't work using a generic address, even Gmail). Your company then has access not only to Google Sites but other Google apps as well including Google Docs and Calendar, all on a shared basis.
You can then invite others in your organization to join. Start building basic pages such as announcements, to-do lists, document upload pages, etc., all using built-in templates. You can even embed Google Desktop Gadgets, which immediately makes Google Sites a fairly robust environment since there are literally hundreds of these widgets available today.
On top of that, other key features include typical in-place wiki-style editing; 10 Mb of storage; and built-in Google-driven search capabilities.
And it's free.
Google Sites competes with existing wiki products like PBWiki as well as 37 Signals Backpack product, which just added multi-user support.
Google says its aiming to take on Microsoft Sharepoint with Google Sites, but that's quite a stretch since Sharepoint is at this point a very robust, server-based collaboration solution with deep ties to Microsoft Office.
Which makes it a great option for sophisticated enterprises but not so great for small businesses -- which just might be the sweet spot for Google Sites.
Check out Google Sites in action in this video:
