The purpose of the Wave invites is so that they can fix scaling issues as they arise. Wait until its out of its limited technology preview status before you pass judgement on how it was launched.
You have a good point, but it does not negate the Author's point that wave requires people that you can collaborate with.
If they wanted to go with this limited technology preview, I suspect the launch would have gone much more smoothly if people who got the initial invites had the ability to invite (a limited number) others in their group. That way the people they did want to collaborate with would be on wave.
Also, I think the author has a good point with how Buzz was released. I use social networking (facebook), but I use it cautiously. I may have ended up using Buzz, but I would have been much happier if it had been opt in. As it is, I can't even find a good way to entirely opt out.
If Buzz had been released with invites, I think that it would have had the same problems as Wave with no one checking it.
Both of them should be separate Google apps with Gmail notifications, but no Gmail integration. Wave could still have been invite-only for scaling reasons, but both of them would still have had better reception this way.
wave is all about starting from a clean slate -- not constrained to integrate with existing systems. buzz is all about leveraging gmail by adding broadcast and location.
This doesn't negate the author's point. For a lot of people, "buzz is all about leveraging gmail" is the problem with buzz.
If buzz were a good product it would stand on its own merit without needing to "leverage" gmail. The trouble is that it's not a good product -- it's a lame me-too effort that offers little over its rivals (Twitter and Facebook). Me-too is fine so long as you bring something to the table, and buzz doesn't seem to, except for gmail integration, which an awful lot of people think is actually a hindrance.
Google have shown time and time again that they don't get "social networking", which is fine because they're a search and ads company and they do get those[1]. (I'm thinking of Orkut, OpenSocial, the way they introduced following into Reader and now buzz).
Buzz has already wormed it's way into my life. Sure, it's mainly done that by telling me it's there every time I check gmail - which is too much. But the way I like it is that it tells me the interesting things my friends are doing elsewhere, and lets me talk about them. Very few people actually Buzz deliberately, but then many conversation get started by a tumblr post, or a twitter post. Sure, those obviously have their own mechanisms for interaction, but those mechanisms aren't cleanly integrated into something I have open all the time, and telling me about them. Um, except twitter, because I have that as a widget in the side of the page.
Oh, and the (pretty much separate) geolocating public Buzz layer on Maps for mobiles is very nice. I discovered a tea place I want to check out just round the corner from my house, if nothing else.
It is expected that even the Google designers themselves could not predict how or where their systems could be used.
But now it is clear: Google Buzz is social media, competing in the same space as Facebook and Twitter. Google wave is enterprise colaboration, competing in the same space as Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint.
I really think Google can, should and must win in this message-oriented social networking space. I'd like to see it win too. But between Twitter and Facebook, Google shouldn't become too dependent on either for fresh, quality content from the masses.
They stuffed up the launch: so what. Twitter had scalability issues for a long-time, it much worse than this, and not easily remedied.
