Yahoo Backs Google’s OpenSocial

By Geoff Duncan March 25, 2008

In a move that’s certain not to sit well with Yahoo‘s would-be overlords in Redmond, the company has announced a partnership with MySpace and Google to form the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation, dedicated to driving the development of platform-neutral social applications for the Internet. The OpenSocial Foundation will service as a community-driven, neutral forum for developing applications for Google’s OpenSocial API. The organization will operate as a non-profit, with member organizations assigning it assets by July 1.

“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 Yahoo’s VP for platforms Wade Chambers, in a statement. “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.”

Yahoo announced support for OpenID back in January.

Google’s OpenSocial API, announced in late 2007, is designed to enable developers to create a social applications (say, for sharing photos, favorite songs, polls, or anything else), build the application to a single set of programming interfaces, and be able to deploy that applications seamlessly across a broad range of social networks, including as MySpace, bebo, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.

The OpenSocial Foundation Web site will host the latest OpenSocial specifications and links to development resources. Google, Yahoo, and MySpace say engineers from all three companies will work to release the specs under Creative Commons licenses and develop an open source reference implementation—dubbed Shindig—as a project in the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator.

Redmond software giant Microsoft Corporation is currently attempting to acquire Yahoo in a $40+ billion deal. Microsoft does not currently support OpenSocial (a proposed standard from rival Google). Yahoo’s continued involvement in the OpenSocial Foundation would be questionable if Microsoft’s takeover attempt succeeds.

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