Eh, my opinion is probably an unpopular one but I would've preferred to have my main social network integrated with my email, my phone, etc. The main problem for me was pretty much no one else used it. I'm not a huge social network person in general though. I do agree that it didn't "deserve" to be popular just because google made it - which google probably ended up learning after they made it.
I actually thought Wave had potential though. Sure, it had tons of flaws, but it was at least trying something new. Plus is just so.. well, not new. And this is coming from someone who used Plus for quite a while (year or two).
To me, Wave felt shut down too early.. and of course, way over hyped. By comparison to Wave, i'm shocked Plus still exists.
I felt like Google had a lot of very interesting social tools between Wave, Reader, Talk, and Buzz (remember that?). Consolidating that wasn't a bad idea, had they picked the best innovations and smartest social groups from all three of them. Unfortunately, Plus felt more like taking the worst of all three (Buzz's forced inclusion, for instance) and ignoring any of the innovation (Wave, especially), reverence for internet standards (Reader based on RSS, Wave and Talk based on XMPP to different extents), or existing social groups (Reader had a somewhat active social scene before Plus that could not survive the transition, especially the shutdown of Reader itself).
There's a sense there of some hostility between the groups involved at the time and something of a hostility against the "techie-first" nature of the company before plus. I'm one of the ones that question if Google lost a lot of its "soul" in building Plus and trying to be more like Facebook.
I figure there's an alternate universe out there where something like Plus started as a smarter merger of Wave and Reader, and I'm curious what that would have looked like.
When Google Wave was released, I tried it for a personal chat and came away confused and not getting how to use it effectively. Later on, while chatting with a few team members regularly on IRC (some of them being long running discussions), I realized the genius of Google Wave and thought it could've helped our chats and discussions a lot. It was way ahead of its time but was unfortunately shutdown.
I think there are some products where the company hopes for massive initial success, but fail to achieve it, and then they have to decide whether they want to play the long game, or kill the product. I think Amazon did this with Amazon Prime, and it worked out tremendously in the long run.
Looks like Google decided to be in it for the long haul with Google Plus, but let Google wave die due to a lack of popularity. But that would have been a very good product to play the long game with.
Agreed on your Plus note, especially since it really wasn't a novel idea. But for Wave, i kind of liked it...or at least thought it was different/innovative sort thing; admittedly it needed much more refinement, maybe focus. But Wave was pretty neat.