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Google is on a spending spree this August. Lots of buzz around the buying spree, the recent Social Deck purchase and how it all fits into Google’s overall plan.

So what are they buying in Social Deck? It’s a social gaming platform with impressive social features and cross platform integration capabilities. Take a look at the official demo on the Social Deck site below (warning: a bit boring and long, but worth it!)

Over at inside social games, they think Social Deck adds significant cross platform social integration capabilities:

“What makes this more interesting than just a game developer acquisition is that SocialDeck has significant cross-platform experience. A non-game product it offers, called Spark, provides social integration across Blackberry, the iPhone and Facebook, while Shake & Spell also works on all three of those platforms.

TFTS think it’s about Andriod dominanting gaming:

“Not only does this support the Google Games rumor but it also leads us to believe that Google will be making a massive push soon enough to market the Android as a premiere mobile gaming platform. It already has a ton of games available for download in the Android Marketplace but Google has yet to really market the platform in terms of gaming when compared to Apple with their iOS platform.”

ZDNET thinks the acquisition is about building a funner version of Facebook:

“It appears, in fact, that Google intends to out-fun Facebook when it launches its own social platform (presumably called Google Me).”

Information Week does a good job reminding us why Google needs to get a social network off the ground to compete with Facebook. It’s about social network ad sales:

“Social networking is a problem for Google because communication across Facebook happens without the involvement of Google’s search engine and without the opportunity for Google to sell search ads. Google thus needs to have its own social network to participate in potential social network ad sales.”

I go with the theory that Social Deck adds to Google’s ability to launch social networking. I’m not sure if it will be funner than Facebook, but it will likely be more open, flexible and mobile.

I think Google should try to merge the best of Twitter’s cocktail party approach, the ability to discover new people and interact easily, and Facebook’s dinner party approach, being more private and engaging more deeply with a select few. That’s what missing, and the opportunity for Google.

So what do you want from a Google Social Network?

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