Mike has a big scoop on Google’s plan to respond to Facebook.
In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.
This sounds powerful, but as Danny Sullivan points out in the comments, Google is not there yet. Worth the entire read.