On the heels of social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have come social applications, games, and services in the form of widgets that employ the data that users store and maintain on social networks. Since Facebook, the first company to open its doors to outside applications, launched its Platform last May, more than 20,000 applications have been built for the social network. Google, meanwhile, has been spearheading OpenSocial, a standard aimed at making it easier for applications to be used on multiple networks. Earlier this week, Yahoo announced its support of OpenSocial–which Facebook has not done–and joined Google and MySpace to form the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit organization that the companies say would will be responsible for protecting the standard.
Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, said in a press conference earlier this week that the foundation is meant to provide “safe harbor for intellectual property … by making it clear that OpenSocial’s use will be forever free and unencumbered, and to make sure that the OpenSocial Foundation stays community driven so that no one company ever has undue influence.” Kraus said that the companies plan to have the OpenSocial Foundation up and running in about 90 days.
OpenSocial is intended to allow developers to write an application for one social network and easily adapt it for another. In contrast, Facebook’s Platform requires the use of Facebook-specific programming techniques. Google announced OpenSocial last fall, and social networks including MySpace, hi5, and LinkedIn stepped forward during the following months to join in. So far, OpenSocial applications have only been launched on Google’s Orkut and on MySpace; hi5 plans to launch them on Tuesday. Between these three networks, Kraus said at the press conference, developers will have access to about 200 million users with a single application.
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