Google today launched an official blog about the social web. Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager for Google Friend Connect, writes:

“We think the web is better when it’s social. …[W]e are developing tools to make ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality….

“We will write about social initiatives within Google, such as Google Friend Connect, as well as community efforts like OpenSocial. We plan to share some success stories, present tips and tricks, provide updates when there are new developments, and much more.

“And we want to hear what you have to say. … Tell us about what you’ve been doing to make the web more social, what you’ve seen others successfully do, or simply what you think about our posts. We look forward to hearing from you and keeping you updated on Google products that are helping the make the web more social.”

Google has their hand in every imaginable kind of Internet activity, from maps to advertising to video to email to the Android mobile phone and beyond, and more developers than you can shake a stick at. Yet they seem to have stumbled when it comes to the social web.

As SocialMedia.com explains, “Google Friend Connect lacks adoption and OpenSocial hasn’t pushed the envelope, but rather enabled a kind of application arbitrage, where the money making apps are ported to MySpace.” While Google has slowly (and bumpily) rolled out their social web offerings, other companies’ apps like Facebook and OpenID have taken an early lead in user adoption.

For the most part, this new initiative has been greeted with a cautious-but-positive reponse. However, ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick gives voice to some of our (possibly paranoid, possibly well-founded) concerns that “Google is Big Brother just waiting to happen. The company indexes the bottom of the ocean, the web, the view of the front of your house and an increasing number of peoples’ genetic makeup. That’s not something to take lightly.”

It’s heartening to see Google’s Social Web Blog inviting reader feedback and participation from the outset. Time will be the test of whether user input will drive the content on the blog, and be reflected in Google’s social web offerings as well.