You read my mind! :-)

Wave wasn't overhyped if you consider how successful products like Slack are today.

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.