Ender Pearl

The Ender Pearl is a new item in the 1.8 update and is sometimes dropped by endermen upon death. This item has no use yet. These pearls can be commonly found in bodies of water "naturally" as endermen will occasionally walk into water and die there from water damage.

Future Use
In future versions of Minecraft it will be possible to throw an ender pearl in order to teleport to its impact location. However, teleporting with ender pearls will only work in survival and hardcore mode and will result in 5 falling damage.

Bugs
In beta 1.9 prerelease 2, if you try to use an ender pearl you will be kicked from the server for hacking, no matter the flying is enabled or not in the server.propeties.