Google... Maybe taking over the world?

So, I saw something in the New York Times the other day that I thought was interesting.  Google, is in its last steps to take over the world.  Worry not, it looks as if they'll be benevolent overlords.  OK, what I'm actually talking about is that Google, once again is trying to break into the social networking world . 

This company seems great at a lot of things.  They basically reinvented the Internet and, like it or not, they gave us the word Google in more parts of speech than is really necessary. They've tried this before though.  Like the article in the Times said (read it, its really good) they've really only been able to do it in Brazil and India.  Not that I'm knocking anything that can be a success in India (the worlds second largest country by population and growing FAST in the computer area) but lets face it, they're not Facebook, they're Orkut... I've never Orkuted anything, so its not great at riding its own coat-tails.

Heres the real deal though, this writer noted, and rightly so, that Google operates on algorithims and that you can't algorithim (verb) a social network.

I disagree.  FLAT OUT.

Heres the thing.  Many different forms of artificial intelligence (henceforth, and forevermore refered to as AI) are great at simulating social interactions in many situations.  The great thing is that many of these programs can even give you the algorithims that they use to do it.  NetLogo for instance, is a multi-agent based system that can be programmed to do all sorts of things.  I'm currently using it to model a number of aspects of religious sociality (to varying success I admit).

Then, theres NodeXL, which has the ability to go into social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and even Flickr if I'm not mistaken and can then construct the actual networks that exist between variables that are searched for and spit it out into an Excel spreadsheet, ready for your analysis however you see fit.

The real good thing about the article... They hinted that maybe, just maybe, its just Google and they can't quite do the social networking thing.  Apple already has Ping, a social network built into the newest version of itunes, as if itunes didn't already revolutionize the way we interact (remember napster? HA, how 1998 of you).

Anyways, point is, its not that social networking can't be done by Google, on Google's terms.  They could start finding some algorithims, they could start programming it, but, could they do it as well as Facebook? OR are they doing it because Facebook has done so well?