The Internet is all alight today with news of Google's latest effort to crack the social network market, Google+. Of all of the articles covering the launch, the following article from Ars Technica provides the most depth:

Inside Google+: how the search giant plans to go social

In that article, the following quote from Google's Joseph Smarr reminds me once again why I don't use Gmail:

"We've got this whole system already in place that hasn't been used that much where we keep track of every time you email someone or chat to them or things like that," says Smarr. "Then we compute affinity scores. So we're able to do suggestions not only about who you should add to a circle, or even what circles you could create out of whole cloth."

Nice! Google's recent attempts at social networks Buzz and Wave have been unsuccessful, so it will be interesting to see how this one turns out.

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Updated 2022 : note that the above post was originally published in 2011, but is left here for archival purposes. Google+ has long-since been shutdown by Google.