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Google has been doing some major housecleaning: The web giant announced Wednesday that it would be shuttering Google Labs, an online incubator of experimental products.

Google recently announced its Q2 2011 earnings on July 14, 2011. [1] For the quarter, total advertising revenues surged by about 33% over Q2 2010 values driven by increased paid clicks as well as higher cost-per-click rates over the same quarter last year.

Well, now we know that Google+ is the equivalent of Alaska in the social networking world: At least two sites tracking Google+ users say more than 73 percent are male.

Google+, the new It girl in the social media world, may surpass 10 million users today, just two weeks after it launched.

Since its debut in late June, Google+ has captured much of the tech world's online conversation.

Google’s +1 buttons have only been out for about a month, but they’re already more common than the tweet button on major web destinations.

Morgan Stanley analysts downgraded Google Inc shares to "equal-weight" from "overweight" on Friday, citing an expected decline in margins in this year and the next.

Could social networking company Facebook Inc.’s big news on Wednesday be a partnership with Internet video calling firm Skype Limited? That’s the word on the street, according to reports. The partnership would allow friends to chat with each other, and potentially give it an edge over Mountain View-based Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), which has launched its own Google+ social networking service.

Skype and Facebook have both declined to comment. But an announcement is expected at 10 a.m.

So, based on the buzz, Google+ is the geek-chic social-networking upstart that's going to challenge Facebook, right?

Google took its biggest leap yet onto Facebook’s turf on Tuesday, introducing a social networking service called the Google+ project — which happens to look very much like Facebook.