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If at first you don't succeed — and you can't manage to buy someone — try, try again. That's what Google and Yahoo, realizing the failure of their social-networking products, are doing. Google's Orkut is a nonstarter outside India and Brazil, and Yahoo 360 is, well, a nonstarter everywhere. Here's how the two giants of the Web are trying to fix their social inadequacies.Google's entrant is Socialstream, a Google-sponsored project at Carnegie Mellon University, which, instead of serving as a social network itself, attempts to unify multiple networks. That's a product that users, drowning in multiple logins and passwords, could badly use. And it plays to Google's strengths: Rather than trying to get users to contribute content to a new network, Socialstream just uses software to bring existing information on the Web together in one place, much like Google's Web search.

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(Screenshot by Google Operating System) Less is known about about Yahoo Mosh, a site that's live internally on Yahoo's network but blocked from outsiders. But I did find this intriguing trace: When you google "mosh.yahoo.com", you turn up a couple of results on YouTube. The inbound links from Yahoo Mosh to the YouTube videos suggest that Yahoo Mosh is a combination of profiles and bookmarks — a mashup, in other words, of Yahoo 360, Yahoo's failed MySpace clone, and Del.icio.us, Yahoo's popular bookmarks website. "A social network so user-friendly, even your mom knows it's redundant!" says Valleywag contributor Nick Douglas. If you want to know what Yahoo Mosh's internal beta testers are watching, here's a clip: