Google (News - Alert) has been successful at a lot of things – witness the news yesterday that the company is seeing activations of 500,000 new Android handsets each day – but thus far, the company has missed in its efforts to break into social networking and carve out a slice of the pie that Facebook built. Co-founder and new company CEO Larry Page (News - Alert) has made it a personal crusade to succeed where the company has failed in the past. Without a viable, popular social networking vehicle, the company will never be able to obtain the kind of Web dominance it desires.

To this end, the search giant is introducing a full-fledged social network called Google+, reports Reuters (News - Alert). The push is an attempt to stave off a loss of the company’s current position as the main gateway to the Internet all across the world, and it’s critical that the company succeed this time, say analysts, particularly as people spend more of their time on social networking Web sites.

“They had the luxury of making mistakes in the past with their social initiatives. They don’t really have that luxury now,” Ray Valdes, an analyst at research firm Gartner, told Reuters. “Companies that are successful with the social web will get the page views, they’ll get the engagement and they’ll eventually get the advertising dollars that are so important to Google.”

Google+ is currently in beta testing. Reportedly, it bears some resemblance to a Facebook (News - Alert)-like structure, with profile pictures and newsfeeds forming a central core. With Google+ though, a user’s friends or contacts are grouped into very specific circles of their choosing (such as “College Friends,” “Family” or “Coworkers”) rather than a large, single pool.

It’s going to be a hard uphill climb for Google. The company will need to first catch up with Facebook, which has about 700 million users all over the world. And to succeed, Google will have to differentiate itself and offer value beyond that of Facebook to social networking users.

So how it can it do that? By hitting Facebook in its sore spot: privacy. Facebook is frequently criticized for its weak privacy default settings, it’s difficult process in changing those settings, and loopholes through which personal user information can slip into the hands of other Facebook users, developers and advertisers.

“In the online world there’s this ‘share box’ and you type into it and you have no idea who is going to get that, or where it’s going to land, or how it’s going to embarrass you six months from now,” said Bradley Horowitz, Google VP of Product Management. “For us, privacy isn’t buried six panels deep,” he said, clearly taking a dig at Facebook.

Google+ started rolling out to a limited number of users yesterday, says Reuters, in what the company is calling a “field trial.” Only those invited to join will initially be able to use the service. Google has yet to say when the service will be rolled out on a wider basis.

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