Can Google win at social media?

I recently wrote about Microsoft product flops, but Google has also let the dogs out more than once (admit it, you thought about the Baha Men, didn’t you?) when it comes to social media space. Are they capable of producing a winner?

Sync’s Andrew Kameka has just posted that it’ll soon be time to wave goodbye to Wave. Andrew says he likes Wave but admits that he’s “in limited company.” Even Google say that, “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.” And don’t worry too much if you haven’t heard of Wave – besides an early clamour to obtain invites to the beta program, it really hasn’t generated much buzz.

This brings us neatly to another dog: Buzz. Except for some early criticism about its privacy controls, not much has been heard about Google Buzz. In case you’re not familiar with Buzz, it’s a Twitter-like service that enables people to (in Google’s words), “Share updates, photos, videos, and more.” For whatever reasons, Buzz has never managed to achieve mainstream popularity and appears to be in terminal decline with a substantial amount of its content appearing to be material that people automatically share from their blogs, Twitter and Flickr accounts.

Then there is Orkut which PCWorld’s Tom Spring calls “The Hoff of Social Networks.” While the Friendster-like service is moderately popular in some countries, it hasn’t caught on either in Canada or the US. And let’s not forget (or maybe we should forget – pretty much everybody else has!) Jaiku, Latitude and the now deceased Dodgeball, and Lively.

And now there are rumours that Google is planning a new social networking service to take on Facebook. What do you think about this? Will Google get it right this time? And, even if they do, will people be willing to abandon their Facebook buddies and head to a new social network?