We had that a decade ago with blogs. Social is about linking it all up which - and this is what Google doesn't get - is not a technical problem. No-one yet has a seamless, intuitive way to have a work social network, a personal social network, a social social network (for want of a better term... People who aren't really friends but that you do stuff with) and manage them all via one service. You can have friends on Facebook and work colleages on LinkedIn and random people on Twitter, for example. But that's not the same thing. Google thinks everyone who knows me even slightly wants to know everything about me, the more the better. That quite rightly annoys people.
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We had that a decade ago with blogs. Social is about linking it all up which - and this is what Google doesn't get - is not a technical problem. No-one yet has a seamless, intuitive way to have a work social network, a personal social network, a social social network (for want of a better term... People who aren't really friends but that you do stuff with) and manage them all via one service. You can have friends on Facebook and work colleages on LinkedIn and random people on Twitter, for example. But that's not the same thing. Google thinks everyone who knows me even slightly wants to know everything about me, the more the better. That quite rightly annoys people.
Maybe Google hasn't solved it yet, but they're at least aware of it. Take a closer look at this slideshow from one of their UX guys...
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...
It's all about the problem where social circles overlap.