Spot on. When GMail was still in Beta, and you didn't know anybody else on it, at least you could still send and receive email with the rest of the world.

also gmail gave you 5 or more invites so you could invite your friends. Wave should have done the same. It would have allowed small social networks of people to play with it together.

As I recall, I had several invites when I got in. The problem was that those invites went into a queue, they were a lie. With gmail (at least when I got to it), my invites were sent out immediately and the recipient could start using gmail that day. With Wave, my invites were queued and when Google felt it was time they'd send it out. This could be days or, in at least one case for me, weeks later. By the time I got enough people in to give it a shot, only myself and the most recent were interested in trying it.

Well, even though many if not most of my friends ended up with an invite (and we made active use of Wave), that didn't make it a success: the client was just too slow and laggy. It basically only worked in chrome, and poorly there. Large threads were simply unusable.

I don't think the closed beta-ness of wave really hurt it. If wave had actually worked well, then maybe there'd have been a point where it was worth opening up to many users - but wave never got there, so it's a moot point.

This is very true for a collaboration platform. I wanted to use this for school to collaborate with the groups there. If 1 person of the group did not have Wave, we couldn't use it.

Yup. My main experience with it was "Looks nice. No one here, though."

Sounds like G+

In my experience, Google+ is a great place to find passionate communities of small niches. Tabletop role-playing games, for example, have thoroughly adopted G+.

Google+ falls down for mainstream users, though, which is where the "no one here" perception comes from.

If memory serves, Google Wave was the same way: great for the people who used it, but the value wasn't perceived by the majority.

It's also great if you treat it like an intelligent twitter and follow science and tech people. Also party mode on events is killer.

It was Googles first attempt to create their own social network. In the end, it crashed and burned just as hard as Google Buzz did.

Wave was not an attempt to create a social network, it was an attempt to create a next-gen replacement for Email.