Google recently announced that its revenues were up by 58 percent. For any other company, that would be good news. But this is Google we’re talking about, where only the fantastic will ever be good enough.

Google’s news came only two days after Yahoo announced a quarterly earnings drop, which adds some perspective to the reaction.

The search company’s performance again centred on to strong search advertising sales, in which Google’s revenue reached $3.87bn in the second quarter, up from $2.46bn in the same quarter last year. Net profits hit $925m, up from $721m.

CEO Eric Schmidt, during a meeting with analysts said, “We’ve delivered strong revenue performance, particularly on core Google.com search, and strong cash flow in our seasonally weak quarter. Traffic is stronger at Google.com, both domestically and internationally, with annual traffic growth actually increasing over time.”

Revenues from Google.com alone hit $2.5bn, representing year-on-year growth of 74 percent.

Revenues from AdSense — the ad network for third-party web sites — grew 36 percent over last year, to $1.35bn.

Schmidt continued, “The summer seasonality that we always talk about does appear to be milder than we expected, and we’re improving our ability to monetize searches, as we do every quarter.”

CFO George Reyes commented, “Spain, Italy, and France in particular outperformed in Q2, while Germany, along with the UK, were significant drivers of revenue growth.”

UK revenues were $600m, a 4 percent increase.

Overall, operating income dropped to $1.1bn, and there was a 7.12 percent drop in Google’s stock price in after hours trading.

Google has sponsored a project at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute to “rethink and reinvent online social networking”. This was largely to overcome problems with its Orkut network.

“Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project’s scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty. After initial brainstorming and research, we chose to focus on the effects of a new model for online social networking: a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications.”

Socialstream, as the network is called, is able to “draw content from a variety of sources. Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them.”

This idea is to allow users to centralize information about contacts on different social networks in a single place — assuming, of course, that the other networks have an API and don’t act like walled gardens. Socialstream uses data from blogging and photo-sharing sites like Blogger, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.

“Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user’s online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came.”

This could be an interesting project to watch.