Buzz was a Twitter clone, but it was too little too late. Anything you can do with Buzz, you can do with Google+.
Wave was an attempt to replace traditional email, but it only outperformed email under some circumstances, say, if you were collaborating on a group or something. There is a gap between Wave and Gmail but using Gmail saves the hassle of learning the whole new concept of communication.
And for a communication tool, if it fails to archive mainstream adoption, it fails. You can't learn a cool new language while everyone's talking in legacy English.
For Reader, it's quite a different thing actually. Google does not provide a decent alternative. Some of you might say social networking sites can be used to get news, I think it's rarely the case for everybody, especially for international users outside of US/UK. I live in a country where every big sites support RSS but very few support social networks. All I can get from social networking sites is funny pictures and inspirational quotes, sometime unconfirmed rumors. Few to none news websites/journalists can be found on social networks, if there is, news is not reliable enough.
Once upon a time, Google was cool and they cared about making cool products before they even figured out how to make money with it. That day has now long gone.