Perhaps, but I think for this particular market they had no choice but to launch big. Look at Orkut, their previous (dead) attempt at a social network. Facebook is extremely entrenched now, and there's little to no incentive to users to opt-in to something else. To attack the power of Facebook/Twitter, this was really the only way of doing it (although I agree, perhaps a Labs feature would have been a better way of introducing the concept for a couple of months at first).

Orkut is hardly dead, just because a product isn't popular in your market doesn't mean it's dead.

It's dead for the market that includes its developers as members. Reflexively dead, as it were. It becomes a lot harder to care about maintaining something once you yourself no longer get anything out of using it.

Orkut engineering is in India and Brazil.

I agree with you that Google has their work cut out for them trying to get into this market, but that doesn't excuse their mistake.

If you think it does then I am very curious to hear how you felt when Microsoft leveraged their desktop strength to compete with Netscape in the browser wars.