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Regarding social media, the best you can say about Google is that the company has merely dabbled in it. Google’s absence in this space becomes as glaring as Godot’s when chief rival Microsoft is busy funneling money toward the hottest new products, products created even by former Googlers.

That leaves us with two options: Google’s either planning something or avoiding it altogether. Recent events—or maybe better, non-events—suggest the latter.

Google’s become much better in the past year or so at keeping big secrets and then dropping them kind of Apple style on mouth-agape crowds. One supposes Google’s apparent pullback and nonparticipation in the social media craze suggests something major on the horizon.

But that’s just a pipe dream. Google seems more interested lately in cooling its jets, saving money, and wrestling with telcos in DC over highly complex network issues affecting some grand consequence fairly far down the road. My hunch is that Google is more concerned about actual networks, not social ones. Actual networks are expensive, not subject to faddish whims, and in the long term offer tremendous leverage to those who control them. Remember all that dark fiber? All that hardball over spectrum? All those enraged telecom executives?

But that’s another article, actually one I’ve written several times.

Google’s history with social networking isn’t a very good one. You’ve heard of Orkut, Google’s social network, only if you’re one of three people: an Indian, a Brazilian, or somebody who follows Google’s every little move.

The company had the opportunity to buy MySpace for half what News Corp. paid. The Big 3 (Schmidt, Page, Brin) thought they could do better and said so. We’re still waiting for that, and in the meantime Google spent twice what News Corp. paid to serve search ads to MySpace, a bum deal Google’s not going to renew.

And YouTube, the most visited video site on the net, a worldwide phenomenon and cherished source of user-generated content, is a money pit that got them sued by Viacom for a billion dollars. 

Given just that short history of being either unimpressed, ineffective, or royally screwed over, it shouldn’t be that surprising Google’s sitting out the social networking thing lately. Plus, sensing the economic crunch knocking at ad revenue doors, Schmidt has already said the master plan at the moment is to sit on the money, maybe swim around in it ala Scrooge McDuck.

What about Googler-created Twitter? Schmidt remains unimpressed with the “poor man’s email system,” though parts of the company are playing along via Twitter accounts among murmurs of realtime search and customer resource management. What they’re not doing is sponsoring stuff there, unlike Microsoft. They’re also not pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars into Facebook—like Microsoft has done.

Maybe Google’s playing Rope-a-Dope. Let Microsoft spend its money. Let social networks expend their energy trying to figure out a way to monetize. Let all of them plow through their resources. When they figure it out, we’ll jump in. That’s certainly what Wall Street analysts are advising, too.

Or maybe they’re just really not interested.

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Is Google playing Rope-a-Dope with social media?