As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.

I think this ex-Googler has it spot on: You can’t force people to use your stuff. How many of us have a Google account? And how many times did we use Google Wave, or Google+?

Giving Google some credit, they saw Google Wave was a complete flop and scrapped it; something Kevin Rose’s company Milk did today with Oink. Having only launched 3 months ago, they have decided to shut the service down for good.

Scrapping things takes guts (and a ton of money) but ultimately admitting you are wrong and moving on is a better thing to do then leaving it to turn into a ghost town.