I’ve written about it numerous times before, on various sites, and now thanks to one leaked video, it appears I can rest assured knowing that Google is finally taking the steps necessary to get serious about social networking and media.

Basically a very recent (as in 5 days ago) video was leaked (and since taken down) showcasing an internal Google meeting focusing mainly on the Google Reader app, but also delving into Google’s social ideas (as the two seem very much intertwined – which is EXACTLY what I’ve been hoping for). There is almost too much good information to go over, but just read Google Blogoscoped’s nicely broken down synopsis post.

Not only is Google getting serious about social networking, they are apparently taking a page from the playbook of one of the best at it, Facebook:

Google’s recent big social effort is called Mocha-Mocha (or Mocka-Mocka?), and will become the infrastructure for all social stuff across all of their applications. As a part of this, a new feature called Activity Streams will be introduced or at least implemented in Reader this quarter. This will be comparable to Facebook’s News Feed (Minifeed?) feature, and integrate Gmail’s addressbook and contact list.

That should be very interesting as long as they start showcasing things like the most-read and most-starred posts within Reader. Google obviously has to be careful here though, as they don’t want to open up such a service to the onslaught of gaming of the system that goes on at Digg and the like.

Beyond Google Reader, it sounds like this social movement is a much more all-encompassing plan than they get into in this video. To me it sounds like just about every Google App will eventually be tied together with this social glue – which is great, exactly what should be done. But I am a little worried about how they plan on handling all of this information from such a wide array of places. They’ll definitely need some kind of main landing page/area to tie it all together, but there seems to be no real obvious candidate for that yet. Will it be iGoogle? Orkut? Something new?

Without this main area to tie everything together, Google Social (as I’ll name it) could turn into something like Facebook without the walled-garden that keeps it together. That may sounds enticing to some, but just think about it, it would be absolutely chaos. You would not be able to find anything because there would simply be too much data and too many options to sort through. Sure, you could probably do a Google Search, but what do you search for when you can search for anything?

It’s going to be an interesting next year for Google (I have more on information on why that I’ll post later). At least I don’t have to be worried about Google almost completely ignoring (outside of Orkut) the social space anymore.