"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.

Core Elements

"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.

Breaking Down Silos

OpenSocial attempts to address the problem of integration in the social-networking space. To date, each social network -- from Facebook and MySpace down to very small entrants -- has been developed as a self-contained universe. Users have to re-create profiles and rebuild networks of friends for each network.

As the networks developed into platforms with third-party developers, the problem has become more severe. Developers now have to rewrite their programs for each social-network platform. That means developers have to focus their attention on the biggest networks, and smaller networks are increasingly locked out.

OpenSocial deals with this problem by developing standard programming interfaces for social-networking developers. By writing to OpenSocial specs, applications will run on all networks that support the standard. The combination of Yahoo, Google and MySpace effectively pits the companies, and many smaller players, against Facebook, the only major network not to commit to the initiative.

"Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open-source initiatives but will not join the foundation," Facebook said. "The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience."