Here is an excerpt from Miguel Helft's April 25th blog article in Bits - The New York Times.
When it comes to becoming a force in social networks, Google and Yahoo have tried and largely failed .... So now Google and Yahoo are taking another tack — turning themselves into social sites without building a social network.
What does that mean? It means that Yahoo [and Google] will attempt to bring the kinds of features that are common on Facebook and MySpace to its own sites. Users may be able to share photos, videos, news reading habits or calendars with their friends and receive alerts about what friends are up to ....
For the complete article go to Who needs another social network?