Google is surely facing some challenge from Facebook, the leading social networking service, with more than 350 million members. Obviously, there’s a huge market that Google simply isn’t able to capture and hold onto. Their Google Wave launch had a lot of hype behind it, but to this day, the tool still isn’t utilized the same way other popular social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter are.

On Tuesday, open-standards guru Will Norris announced that he will be starting a new job at Google on February 1st, and will be joining other new hires. Their main goal will be to “contribute to the merging standards and growing developer community in this space,” he wrote on his blog Tuesday.

Several employees from other “social” companies are also leaving, as is the case of Joseph Smarr, who left Plaxo (who was chief technology officer) to join Google.

Google likely sees the opportunity in social media to “harvest” more information from users, such as all the business reviews provided through the Yelp service, although the deal fell through. Creating a single site that allows everyone to post content to would be ideal, although we already have a similar service, called Posterous, as well as some other services.