OpenSocial foundation formed with big support

Yahoo offers support to standards, forms Foundation with Google and MySpace

The OpenSocial set of standards received a further boost with Yahoo announcing its support for the scheme. OpenSocial is designed to allow the delivery of any application to run across any supported social network. Yahoo, alongside founders Google and MySpace also revealed the formation of the not-for-profit OpenSocial Foundation.

In an official announcement, The OpenSocial Foundation said it will offer “operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform”.

Commenting on the Foundation launch, Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management at Google said, “OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning’; ‘The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

The announcement said the collaborative effort between the three organisations as well as the OpenSocial community will mean both “public community involvement in the specifications direction” and an advance in the OpenSocial specifications. All the specifications will be available under a creative commons license.

The OpenSocial standard is not without critics, receiving accusations of being “boring” and “a full blown disappointment" by head of O’Reilly Publishing and creator of the term ‘web 2.0’ Tim O’ Reilly.

Commenting in November last year, when OpenSocial was originally announced, O’Reilly said, “If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network," he added, "But it provides little incremental value to the user [who is] the real target. We do not want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks."