Google’s latest push into the social network arena is different than their previous attempts. It wants to take on one of the problems social networking has had from the beginning. The fact that you don’t want to share everything with everybody and you don’t want to constantly make lists of friends to share certain things with. That’s a good place to start.

Google’s new Circles service seems to take care of this problem by making those lists easy. Hangout can be seen as an always on video conference that you or your friends can join. Sparks is a service that aims to deliver fresh content on certain subjects like an RSS reader that you don’t have to set up. We will know in time how well people like it, but Google seems to have done a better job this time.

It isn’t really a surprise, but Apple has announced iTunes 10, complete with a brand new logo. The standout feature of iTunes 10 is Ping. Think a music-centered social network like Last.fm.

It will let you get your social fix by following people, even artists, establishing a “circle of friends,” do the whole comment thing, check out custom song and album charts, and find over 17,000 concert listings. Ping is also making the jump to the iPhone and iPod touch, and it’s available with iTunes 10 today.

Google has announced that they will launch Friend Connect, a new service that will allow any site to be turned into a social network. No charge. Basically, Google wants to turn the internet into one huge, universal social profile. Google wanted to tap into the hundreds of millions of users that participate in social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

But when you’re Google, you don’t make a competing site and then see what happens, you launch a service that turns the internet itself into one humongous social networking platform which can be used by anyone, with no charge.