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OpenSocial's On a Roll - Now Yahoo's In

03/26/08

Big happenings yesterday, with Yahoo announcing it will endorse the “OpenSocial” tech spec that was initiated by Google and is also backed by MySpace, Ning, and several others. Yahoo and Google also said, on a conference call they organized for the media, that they, along with MySpace, were forming a non-profit foundation for OpenSocial. The most significant thing I heard from the conference call was that OpenSocial apps will now be able to reach more than potential 200 million users by next week, based on all the social networks signed on to date. That is huge—more users than MySpace and Facebook combined. Which social nets of Yahoo’s will get OpenSocial apps initially?  The firm wouldn’t say, but one wonders about their oldest and best known: Flickr. For the complete lowdown on yesterday’s announcement, see today’s Wall Street Journal coverage.

So, what happens now? Here’s a great look at what we might expect, a post by Clint Boulton on eWeek’s GoogleWatch blog. He looks at several “questions left unanswered in the wake of the conference call.”

The Journal noted that the OpenSocial initiative started slow last fall [I saw one of the first public presentations about it at the Defrag conference in Denver in early November], and that, in those early months, “many developers were disappointed with the technology.” But yesterday’s announcement is a significant win for OpenSocial. Wade Chambers,VP of platforms for Yahoo, said that Yahoo signed on because it felt the emerging standard was “rapidly maturing.”

Looks like it’s got “the Big Mo”—that is for sure. Facebook has to be worried...or least they’re thinking really, really hard right about now. And now everyone’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. Microsoft—an investor in Facebook and current suitor of Yahoo—isn’t yet talking.

What do you think? 

Categories: Community, Social Networking
Keywords: OpenSocial, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Ning, social networks, Microsoft
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Comment #1
By: Randy
03/26/08 - 10:38am
For the time being it will only open up the widgets/applications area. Data portability across networks is still a long way off. Scoble has a post listing some of the problems associated with taking it to the next level... http://tinyurl.com/39leyf
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