If you wasn’t born yesterday then you probably remember Google Buzz, Orkut, and Google Wave. All of those products and services were cool but did not muster enough following to take on Facebook and master social networking. Now it is on to round 4, or is it round 5? Whatever, Google is on to something new and it’s their biggest effort yet to be at the top of social networking.

On Tuesday, Google introduced a social networking service called the Google+ project. This service, which is initially available to a select group of Google users who will soon be able to invite others, will let people share and discuss status updates, photos and links, much like what they do on Facebook today.

Mr. Bradley Horowitz, a vice president for product management at Google, said “In real life, we have walls and windows and I can speak to you knowing who’s in the room, but in the online world, you get to a ‘Share’ box and you share with the whole world”.

Google with it’s Google+ service has an up hill battle to be among the top social networking sites like facebook and twitter. Statistics show that in May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, compared with 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.

With these kind of numbers, Google has to be right on the money with Google+. In my minds eye, Google needs to increase their employee base to include “Less smart people” and include more couch potato people who live to gossip and text online. Understanding how these types of people think and how they live their day is key to understanding what is really wanted in online social networks.