So, Google decides to rename the address book to Open Social Graph and makes a general API for everyone to adopt and gets some attention. Thats really big news.
Welcome innovation.
It's more an extension of their search expertise, and it looks like they should be able to extend it with some of the latent semantic indexing stuff that they already do to make it a useful and powerful tool.
What's innovative about it is the scale at which they are doing it.