I still remember being swept away by Google Wave. Such a cool idea at the time, I thought.

That was such a good idea compared to Google Plus. Your content, your comments, just aggregated.

They could have pulled it off, too, I am sure. They just didn't want to.

Maybe I'm just remembering poorly, but Wave seemed super buggy and laggy to me at the time.

We used it for architectural discussions and exploring ideas. I'd be hard pressed to think of something that was better for that.

For some reason I never saw it working.

Does anyone have a link to a video of it actually being in use?

It was crappy but it's intention was good.

It wasn't the fastest, but I think that now browser (and CPU) tech has moved on since then, it'd probably be a lot smoother. I remember using it once to coordinate specs on a small contract job and it worked pretty well for that.

I liked wave a lot as well.

Certainly that was Google's intention. Thank goodness they failed.

But they didn't even try very hard. G+ didn't event have a way to create events. Google Calendar was on every Android device, it would have been so seamless if you could have create a birthday party or attend a rave in the park and it would be right in your calendar.

But no, you could only post stories and pictures. That made for a rather bare-bones social network.

This is a great illustration of the problem G+ had; events in g+ were amazing but nobody (apparently) knew. Setting them up was easy, inviting people was easy, privacy for events made sense from the UI, etc. If you set things up correctly, everyone who was invited would have a shared photo album that they would be able to share pictures to with one click.

I have a friend who had an amazing wedding photo album created this way; to this day they swear that if it had been marketed better g+ events would have put wedding photographers out of business...

Did people have to have G+ accounts to receive invites? I know Facebook requires it, but if they just used standard calendaring events (maybe with an info link to g+?) that would seem a winner

Maybe they added it later? When it launched there was no such feature, I think they added events after a year or so, but by then all the hype had already died down.

First iteration was rather nice, clean interface without many distractions. However, then they got all cardy with that material design, and it all was very confusing

I swear material design was the result of one too many post-it note sessions.

G+ had events, I used to use them all the time. And then they removed them from communities, which was a large portion of how people (in my circles at least) used them. So that made it a lot less useful.