Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal report Monday that Google will be adding hooks to popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter via Gmail.

While interesting, a Facebook and Twitter plugin wouldn't exactly be game-changing. In fact, my early suspicion was that this might be a Gmail Labs plugin.

But this also sounds very, very similar to Google's recent real-time search efforts, where Google Social Search provides real-time updates from people that you know. It's not that far from an active search for those updates to having them pushed, now that Google has a real-time framework for those updates.

It also seems reasonable to assume that Google is stealing a page from startups like Threadsy, which tries to take feeds, streams, tweets, and other elements of your social networking life into one easy, manageable stream. If so, more power to Google. And that's exactly what you'll be giving the company if you sign on, unfortunately: the ability for Google to sniff a collection of inbound communications and updates, rather than just the Gmail and Google Reader feeds it previously only had access to.

Source: Report: Google ...