Google`s purchase of social application maker Slide and $100 million investment in online gaming provider Zynga provider a window into the company`s social network strategy.

The search engine clearly feels, as Facebook and MySpace did before it, that people want to use social widgets and play games to enhance their social network experience.

Google Buzz is a social conversation service leveraging the massive social graph culled from Gmail. Despite an ugly privacy snafu, Buzz culled tens of millions of users, underscoring the thirst for Google social services.

There are only about 200 million Gmail users who can access Buzz if they choose.

BDST: 1625 HRS, 9 August 2010