Google Wave is not in beta. It's in public preview. Right now they're not interested in being useful to you or any other user; they're still building and design

Google Wave is not in beta. It's in public preview. Right now they're not interested in being useful to you or any other user; they're still building and designing the damn thing. The only reason they let you on is so they have a bunch of new user activity to process. The very fact that people are complaining that it's disappointing means that Google is doing just fine. It might be disappointing to you, the eager early adopter, but it's not stupid on their part. The very fact that you want to have all your friends come use it (I do too) means that whenever Google does decide to open the tap, they will have all the users they want. The network effect is crucial for getting a new communications tool off the ground. And as soon as Google wants to take advantage of the network effect, they'll give you and me some more invitations and I assure you, we won't have any problem finding folks to accept. In the meantime, we're still playing in Google's sandbox. EDIT: Incidentally, as further evidence of the fact that Google is leveraging exactly as much of the network effect as they feel like leveraging: the thing it does where anybody in your GMail contacts is automatically added to your Google Wave contact list is fuckin' brilliant. It's a great way to encourage use, by making sure that as many people as I'm likely to be interested in using Wave with are directly accessible to be contacted, without my even having to say, 'So, did you get a Google Wave invite? Let me know when you're in and we'll chat!'