In the history of Google products, the more boring the product = wider adaption rates and the better the product will be. Google is number one in the market for boring products. Look at the heart of Google, search advertising! It’s algorithms and character counts do not provide great material for a Cannes award submission movie. The only social activity Google has encountered success with is YouTube; most of what is good about YouTube (video democratization through video production and sharing) was already there when Google acquired it. Google has done well with the “boring” aspects of the site making it scale and increasing revenue streams.

Here are a few ways Google has tried introducing social media with “Exciting” and “Boring” entries:

Exciting

Orkut: Google launched it’s own social networking site in 2004, about 14 days before Facebook launched. We obviously know the winner of this initial fight.

Dodgeball: Developed by former Google employee who recently left the company to create similar but much improved site, Foursquare. Dodgeball shut down in 2009.

Jaiku: An early rival to Twitter when there were still many players in the micro-blogging space, but now ranks about 428,000th in U.S. sites.

Lively: Opened this virtual world by saying, “Well this sucks for Second Life.” Guess which one is still around? HINT: Not Lively.

Wave: The developer preview video for this site received over 9 million views, but I do no know anyone that knows how to use it or mainly why they should. The open-ended nature of Wave leaves users wondering what to do with this technology.

Buzz: I am not so sure this worked at all considering it is during work hours that I would use this and mainly to family and co-workers.

Boring

Docs: I talk about Google Docs in almost every blog, because it is such a great feature of Google. Although it started with a pretty dull premise of storing documents online “in the cloud,” and then allowing users to collaborate, this power of collaboration for such a straightforward purpose is what made Docs gain users easily.

Moderator: Anyone can create their own version of Digg where others can contribute and vote on submissions. In May, it became a feature on YouTube which will most likely increase its user base.

Android Photo Sharing: The Iphone still does not have a feature allowing you to share a photo to social sites from anywhere containing a picture.

Google can understand and apply the mechanics of social media, but still the odds aren’t great for Google in the social networking domain. But look at what Google already has and how their magic has been in the more “boring” collaboration and communication tools such as Docs, Talk, Voice, and Gmail. Also they run a successful web browser, a mobile operating system, and is increasingly incorporating more social media content into it’s search engines.

If you hear of Google doing something incredibly “boring,” perk up because it could change the way you communicate, share content, and consumer media.