While Facebook struggles to unbundle it's vertically integrated social network into simplistic mobile apps, Google already has a collection of discrete and powerful apps that millions of active users love every day. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Groups etc are all products that enjoy a level of deep usage that provides a strong foundation for social. Why push users to adopt a stand alone social network called Google+?

While the devil is obviously in the details, here's some of the high level things I'd do if I ran Google's Social Product Strategy...

Discontinue the Google+ brand
Merge Gmail Contacts, Hangouts Buddy List, Youtube Subscriptions, Google+ Circles, Android Address Book etc into a single product called 'Google Contacts'.
Merge G+ accounts with the core Google Accounts product
- Adopt some of the social polish from G+ Profiles
- Display public activity (Shares, +1s, YouTube video uploads etc) on an Activity Timeline
- Ensure strong support for Facebook Connect style functionality. Google Connect. using open standards of course.
[Most Important] Build a discrete product called 'Google News Feed'
- Feed it activity data from YouTube Uploads, YouTube Thumbs Ups, YouTube Comments, Google Drive Actions, +1 Buttons, Google Groups activity Etc based on your Google Contact List
- Base the UI on the existing G+ Cards design with additional refinement based on Facebook style Stories and Story summaries
- Display the Google News Feed in YouTube, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Home page, Google News etc as an open panel/pane/right rail. Depending on the service you bias or filter the feed toward that particular content type (E.g. on YouTube, show mainly YouTube news feed stories with a tab/switch to see 'All' stories).
- Include the News Feed as a default home screen widget on Android
- Heavily filter/summarize the News Feed stories with something similar to EdgeRank
- Now that there's real distribution for Google News Feed stories, give 3rd party developers an API so they can publish to their Google Profile (via Google Connect of course) and, by extension, into the News Feed of followers/contacts.
Keep G+ notifications but simplify the UI and merge it with Android Notification Center - calling it simply 'Google Notifications'. There's no reason my Mobile notifications are different than my web/google notifications.
Fix Hangouts so that it's a first class communications product
- Drop the obsession with Video. A hangout should simply be an ad-hoc or permanent group of 2 or more people. From a group, a user can launch into a Voice OR Video chat. For example right now it's difficult to simply start a voice call without suddenly broadcasting your video to everyone (particularly on mobile).
- Finally add proper SMS support ala Google Voice
- Build a proper Skype class desktop client. The browser extension is barely usable and has a number of limitations due to the browser sandbox
- Streamline the invite/group creation process. Right now it's hard to start an Audio only call (see point 1) or find/send the right invite link (I tried it recently and it failed over and over again)
- Make the web version answer incoming phone calls in less than the 30 seconds it takes now - most people hang up before it connects
- Provide an option (or even default) for the Google Hangouts iOS/Android Dialer to use the Voice network for calls (like Google Voice does right now) rather than data
- Finally kill the Google Voice Web and Mobile apps (since Hangouts would now have feature parity)
- Replace the Android default Dialer and SMS Apps with Hangouts
- Bonus: Buy Humin
Bake some of the G+ social event creation and invitation features deeply into Google Calendar
Build a 'Follow' button that publishers can add to their sites.
- Support RSS. If a user follows a site, have its content start flowing into the News Feed product
- Extend the RSS protocol to leave behind social metadata like Profile URL, Avatar etc on each polling request. This will give publishers the ego stats/follow list from RSS that they get/crave from Twitter/FB
- Support PuSH
- Use OG and oEmbed tags to resolve rich data that looks great in the News Feed (basically throw away the RSS data except the link pointers)
- Side Note: It's a tragedy that they shut down Google Reader instead of using it as the basis of this feature
Move all the G+ photos stuff (and Picasa?) to Google Drive
- Simplify Google Drive privacy/sharing controls so that users choose to make some of their media public and share it on their Google Profile, Twitter, Facebook etc (See Dropbox Carousel, Picturelife etc)
- Seamlessly integrate Android Camera photo roll into Google Drive Photo storage
- Bonus: Buy Picturelife
Fix Google Groups by making it more social and tightly integrated into all other Google products
- Merge some of the G+ Communities functionality into Google Groups (and then depreciate G+ Communities)
- Make groups a first class entity that is shared across all Google products (Just like the suggestion for Contacts in point 2 here)
- Expose Groups into the Gmail sidebar so that I can quickly find emails from my Groups
- Add a Groups News Feed to surface Group activity. This activity should also make its way into each member's personal News Feed
- Add Group Photos powered by Google Drive
- Add a Group Calendar powered by Google Calendar
- Add Group Chat powered by Google Hangouts
- Big one: Google Hangouts become full featured Groups. Every hangout can have shared messages, photos, calendaring, news feed and (of course) chat. Most hangouts are temporary/ad-hoc creations and won't take advantage of this, but some might become permanent collaborations (simply favorite/star a group to keep it handy in the other products/interfaces)
Offer many of the products listed above as JS widgets and simple APIs so they can be more easily adopted by internal groups as well as 3rd parties including...
- Comments
- Contact Management
- Notifications
- News Feed
- Hangouts Dialer
- Follow button
- +1 button (already exists)
- Bonus: Buy Echo

That's just off the top of my head late on a Friday night. What would you do?