Google Wave was an undertaking born directly out of advice-given/beliefs-held by people similar to those on HN. The advice being all you need is a decentralized protocol like Email/XMPP and its possible to succeed in Social. Google tried that with Wave and failed spectacularly. As a result it stopped listening-to/caring about what tech-savvy users say and started dismantling other open standards social tools such as Reader (RSS), XMPP etc.