Yahoo has hooked up with Google and MySpace as a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation. The foundation is an outgrowth of the OpenSocial network, which Google launched last year to build open standards for social-networking sites.
“Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages,” Wade Chambers, Yahoo vice president for platforms, wrote on Yahoo’s corporate blog. But OpenSocial is “no longer a trial balloon — it’s for real,” Chambers wrote. “We are taking this opportunity to help ensure Web sites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.”
Yahoo sees OpenSocial as a natural extension of the Web services and APIs it offers through its Yahoo Developer Network. “We think OpenSocial will continue to fuel this innovation and make the Web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions,” Chambers wrote.
“Together with the OpenSocial community, we are setting new industry specifications for social Web-application development,” said Steve Pearman, MySpace senior vice president of product strategy. The foundation will allow participants to “work together to provide developers with the tools to make the Internet move faster and to foster more innovation and creativity.”
“OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning,” said Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management. “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and Web sites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”
The OpenSocial movement is based on several core elements: Public specifications available under a Creative Commons license, community involvement to shape direction, and an open-source reference implementation called Shindig, which is being developed in the Apache Software Foundation incubator.
OpenSocial attempts to address the problem of integration in the social-networking…