Google's social network is already here

We're all waiting for Google to announce its rumoured social network, but the majority of it is already in place. For all its faults and bad press, Google Buzz does a good job of pulling together photos, links and comments from your friends, and thanks to Latitude it now does check-ins as well. Buzz is even better than Twitter and Facebook at giving you control over which groups of contacts see which content.

Google's real challenge is getting more people to go beyond their Gmail accounts to use Buzz, Google Profiles and other services offered by the company. The Google Operating System blog recently documented a new Profile search feature, and anyone who has a profile can pull in content from Buzz, Twitter, YouTube, Picasa Web Albums and other sites.

Presumably 'Google Me' (or Google +1, or whatever name it takes) will simply be a more formal structuring of these different elements. Your Google Profile will act as your Facebook page, and you can post content to it from all over the Web thanks to the newly unified browsing bar. The company will have to add some spit and polish to the 'friending' process and make the Profiles more user-friendly, but the main building blocks of Google's answer to Facebook are already in place.