Some at the company apparently felt the need to get the word out ahead of mounting speculation that it would use I/O to at least elucidate a grand social strategy, if not a major social product.

The hypothesis that I/O would be a good time to talk about social doesn’t come from thin air. According to both internal plans and external expectations, Google is overdue for a major social play, even if it’s just to describe how it’s making all its products social.

Plus, Google’s social head, Vic Gundotra, is the diva of I/O. The Google leader most comfortable in the spotlight, he has been the key presenter at the last two I/O events, revving up the home crowd of Google developers with big demos, generous giveaways, as well as snarky jabs at competitors.

But, according to sources familiar with Google’s plans, the only social announcement planned for I/O is a preview of what the +1 button for publishers will look like.

The publisher +1 button, which will embed social signals within Google search results through user voting, won’t be available for a few more weeks. That’s despite the fact that +1 has been live on Google’s site since the end of March.

The final decision to hold social out of I/O was made within the last week, said sources, although it had been the tentative plan for the last month or so.

The conference plan is to focus the first day on Android, and the second day on Chrome.

The reason not to use I/O as a platform for a significant and highly anticipated project seems to be fear: Fear of hyping up expectations and fear of instant criticism and comparisons to the social giant Facebook.

There’s also a bit of superstition involved on Google’s part, said sources: The major launches at the last two I/O conferences, Google Wave and Google TV, have been flops. The company doesn’t want to have a hat trick of hyped failures.

Google made social a key part of its agenda in March 2010, when long-time executive Urs Hölzle called on the company to respond to the social challenge with a memo that Steven Levy’s “In the Plex” said was called internally “The Urs-Quake.”

The resulting mobilization was to make almost every product at Google social within a hundred days. It was code-named “Emerald Sea,” after a painting that showed a cresting wave enveloping a powerless ship (again with the fear-based motivation!).

A hundred days passed without the project being completed, so the deadline was pushed back. Then, “before the end of the year” became “April or May timeframe.” In that time we’ve only seen a trickle of social launches, most notably for Google’s search products.

Well, now it’s May, and there’s a stage ready and waiting, but Google doesn’t want to use it.

Please, please watch this video if you want to spit up your soda laughing hysterically.

It mashes up the babbling twin babies YouTube phenom with Google’s +1 shoplift of Facebook’s “Like” button.

Enjoy:

The basic +1 function allows users to recommend a Web page by clicking on a small +1 button next to search results. These votes are aggregated globally, but logged-in users will see the pictures and names of their connections who have “+1′ed” a link.

Just as with Facebook’s “like” button, all +1′s are public. But +1 doesn’t have the social feedback you might get by sharing a link on Facebook or Twitter, or the option to annotate links with your comments.

This is only rolling out gradually, though users can opt in to try +1 at www.google.com/experimental. It’s part of a larger effort to get Google users to start maintaining their Google Profiles–which are obviously key to the grand Google social plan.

For now, users can choose to make their +1′s available as a tab on their Google Profile, but there’s no activity stream that brings together friends’ likes.

Another limitation: right now +1 is only for users’ connections on Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Reader and Google Buzz. Support for connections on other services like Twitter is “coming soon.”

Yet another feature coming soon: +1 buttons for publishers, which they can add alongside the other colorful doodads for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, and perhaps even Google Buzz.

One feature that’s ready at launch is +1 for ads, a highly unusual move in Silicon Valley where monetization is usually relegated to a lower priority. +1 buttons will appear next to Google ads and show which users have clicked on them, just like +1 for search. Advertisers don’t have to pay for the feature but will get reporting on how many +1s they get.

Google already has multiple social search features currently rolled out, and has experimented with users voting on search results in the past through tools like Google SearchWiki (which is no longer available).

Here’s a taste:

AOL programming sites hit all-time high traffic numbers and marked the 21st month of consecutive year-over-year growth for unique visitors, according to the October 2008 comScore Media Metrix report. Unique visitors to AOL’s programming content sites grew 7% year-over-year to 54.3 million in October, and page views more than doubled, up 101% year-over-year to 4.2 billion. Engagement (total minutes) grew 51% year-over-year in October. Total minutes reached an all-time high on AOL.com, growing 27% year-over-year. Additionally, AOL.com page views grew 27%, and unique visitors and total visitors were up 9%, year-over-year, as the site further opened up to third-party content, services and features….”

Etc. ?In the old days, like last spring, this kind of AOL boasting would make competitors at Yahoo (YHOO) quiver with anger, because the Yahoo guys thought that the AOL guys were using legal but sneaky tricks to inflate traffic. Now it’s hard to imagine anyone at Yahoo getting too amped about this stuff, mostly because the people who were most passionate have left.

In any case, the real issue for AOL isn’t traffic. It’s how much that traffic is worth. And those numbers are not so good.

Barclay’s Doug Anmuth, who is covering AOL parent company Time Warner (TWX), sends out his own note this morning, which points out that while AOL’s page views increased 14 percent during the last quarter, overall ad revenue dropped six percent, and display ads at AOL’s own sites dropped 15.4 percent.

His conclusion? “Monetization of non-guaranteed inventory and challenges around Platform A continue to be an issue.” Translation: Doesn’t matter how much traffic you have, if you can’t sell it.

And those problems aren’t going away. Anmuth projects that AOL ad revenue will drop another 4.4 percent in 2009. That’s a projection some might find optimistic.

[Image Credit: Laffy4k]