I am not sure about that. Though I do think there is a certain feeling of elitism within Google, like all the brightest people are inside (which to be honest it's probably a pretty good assessment). So I am not sure how much they can get the very real but very (intellectually) shallow world of social networks.

Googlers seem to love to tackle hard problems (e.g. Wave and Instant search) but social networks are not a hard problem from an engineer point of view.