Yahoo! announced support for the OpenSocial platform this week and has joined forces with Google and MySpace to form the OpenSocial Foundation.
Google’s social network application platform, OpenSocial is a means by which users and developers can access various social networks at the same time to improve their efficiency from chat to messaging to games to sharing of news, information, entertainment etcetra.
OpenSocial was launched in November 2007, and has support from the likes of MySpace and LinkedIn already. Yahoo! will allow users to ‘socialize’ with the millions who are already part of OpenSocial through one of its partner social networks.
The inclusion of Yahoo! will increase the distribution of applications for developers, and more websites will be able to join in, thus providing more features for all users. This move by Yahoo! will give an unimaginable number of opportunities to its users to create and publish more applications.
MySpace, Google and Yahoo! will also join forces to create a non-profit organization, which will be along the lines of the OpenId Foundation, to ensure that OpenSocial becomes a widely-used open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.
“Yahoo! believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” said Wade Chambers, Vice President – Platforms, Yahoo!. “Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web.”
A new website, OpenSocial.org has been launched to serve as the main source of documentation and information about OpenSocial.
Microsoft has also launched a social network initiative this week. Yahoo!, however, is not involved with it and has instead chosen to join forces with Microsoft’s nemesis, Google, in support of their social networking platform. While this might not have been a deliberate snub, it will definitely not go down well with the folks at Redmond who are currently threatening to acquire Yahoo! in a hostile bid, if need be.
