Google social net is about preserving leadership

On the surface, Plus is reminiscent of Facebook — with a Google touch. It lets people share photos and status messages, chat with friends and acquaintances and follow news updates. A prominent feature called circles allows users to organize the people they interact with into groups, such as family, close friends or fishing buddies. Users can choose to share things only among certain circles.

Google Plus is still in a restricted, test phase, and invites to join are highly coveted. Only time will tell if it takes off among the broader public or if it’s too little, too late to face off with Facebook and Twitter on the social front — just as Microsoft has failed to surpass Google in search with latecomer Bing.

Google Inc., which reports its latest quarterly results on Thursday, has done quite well without its own social network. Its search engine accounts for two-thirds of queries made in the U.S., and even more in parts of Europe. Its revenue is expected to surpass $36 billion this year, the bulk of it from text ads that appear alongside search results and other Web content.

But online behaviors are changing. People are spending more time on Facebook and other social networks. And they are increasingly relying on their friends’ recommendations when deciding where to eat and what movies to watch.

Google, meanwhile, has bungled past social media efforts. A sharing program called Wave was quickly killed off because users didn’t know what to make of it. Buzz, a later venture, was the center of a privacy fiasco. Google had been too aggressive about automatically creating circle of friends, which inadvertently revealed whom they’ve corresponded with on Gmail.

Early response to Google Plus has been positive. But that’s no guarantee for broader success. As Google botched one social media effort after another, Facebook grew exponentially.