Adobe® Wave™ is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications. It helps publishers stay connected to your customers and lets users avoid the email clutter of dozens of newsletters and social network update messages.

Adobe Wave is a single web service call that lets publishers reach users directly on their desktop: there’s no need to make them download a custom application or build it yourself.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Adobe Wave

And why do I wrote about this? Look.