Yahoo announced its participation in the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google and News Corp.-owned social networking site MySpace. The non-profit foundation will be run by the three companies to encourage open, community-governed specifications for building social applications across the Web. Google launched the program in November of 2007 to compete with Facebook's developer platform.
"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," Wade Chambers, Yahoo vice president of platforms, said 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."
The announcement will likely come as welcome news to application developers, who have been waiting for a streamlined system to combat the time and energy costs of learning and maintaining various codes for every social network platform in the market.
A Yahoo release said OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common "plumbing" that lets social applications run on many different Websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the Websites. In addition to Yahoo and MySpace, the OpenSocial Foundation also includes social networking site Friendster and professionally-geared social network LinkedIn.
"Together with the OpenSocial community we are setting new industry specifications for social Web application development," MySpace SVP of product strategy Steve Pearman said in a statement. "Yahoo! is an important addition to the OpenSocial movement, and through this foundation we will work together to provide developers with the tools to make the Internet move faster and to foster more innovation and creativity."
Yahoo's anticipated entry into the OpenSocial Foundation was first circulated earlier in the month. The new organization, which the three companies said would operate within a formal intellectual property and governance framework, will be assigned related assets by July 1.
