Good points about communicating your idea to your mother-in-law and using pictures to avoid the tl;dr issue.<p>The advice in here would have been helpful to the Google Wave team I think.<p>Communicating complex technical ideas is hard. Whenever we have an idea for a project, we see if we can sum the project up in a 5 or 6 word slogan. If we can't, it's too complicated and we ditch it.