Not really, no. Google is an advertising company; their revenue comes from understanding people and selling that understanding by proxy to advertisers. Google+

Not really, no. Google is an advertising company; their revenue comes from understanding people and selling that understanding by proxy to advertisers. Google+ is yet another way for them to do that, and it's just one facet of their business. It's a very powerful facet, and they have a lot to gain by making it work well, but it isn't the crown jewel. As far as overhead, I'd suspect that Google+ isn't even a blip on Google's overall radar in terms of overhead - the latest Netcraft survey puts Google as running 4.6% of all webservers on the internet; while it's certainly a large undertaking, Google is at such massive scale already that I don't think deploying a social network necessitates a severe shift in focus.