It wasn't MARKETED to them ... it was release to people who signed up expressing interest. Now, perhaps Google could have found a better place to initially announce it than at their own conference full of developers and social media geeks... but let's face it: they don't want your average office worker trying to use this yet -- it's too freaking buggy, they'll get turned off.

Geeks and early adopters are the only people who Google could expect to stick with it in it's current state (or to at least try it again later).

But given that the people who might end up using Google Wave the most—office workers—are also terribly conservative when it comes to the tools they use, it's not surprising that Google has started with the bloggers. The fact is, the vast majority of the internet has no interest in early adoption.

In any case, it seems clear that Google Wave is still in heavy development. More than any other Google app, Wave deserves and needs its 'preview' appelation. The early adopters are the ones who are going to provide feedback. And even if most people are wrong in comparing Wave to Twitter (I'll be honest, I have not seen that comparison made once, but I don't read Scoble either), it's true that the Wave interface is not the most graceful or immediately-obvious thing to ever roll out of the Google garage.

One of the problems with the current collection of apps and protocols currently used for networking is the very imperfect seamlessness. This is one of the most confusing things to mainstream end users, perhaps the single most confusing thing. They are already confused by the distinctions between the browser, search engines, the desktop, the OS. For example, when a user can drag and drop a picture from one app into an IM, but not into their blog comments, this is incomprehensible if they don't know how the underlying mechanisms work. (And, frankly, irrelevant to what they want to do, which might be to share their vacation photos.)

Something which can let you do a small, but consistent and very useful set of operations everywhere will eventually attract the largest body of users. This is what Google should be aiming for with the Chrome OS. They should make sure that the Wave protocol is throughout that product, and everything else that they do. If they can eliminate the dozens or hundreds of minor frustrations faced daily by users due to the imperfect seamlessness of the current OS/browser/apps toolset, Google will garner tons of mainstream love.

It's a huge marketing problem. If your app can't connect with the early adopters, it will never reach its target market.

Perhaps Google needs to try seeding entire companies at once -- preferably not companies composed entirely of geeks who know what Etherpad is -- instead of handing out invites to random folks. On the other hand, such a strategy would limit their growth rate and constrain their feedback in a different way. It's tricky.

But didn't other companies submitting new revolutionary "never before done" ideas had trouble in explaining it to their early adopters? Email, IM, Java, anything really.

I think Google Wave is great. But it is by its nature revolutionary, maybe we need more time to redefine how we think of "communication on the Internet"

I think the biggest problem is that invites don't work here. If I had access, and wanted to check it out, I'd need invites for all my colleagues, too.

You can't test a collaboration tool if the people you collaborate with can't frigging access it.