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Google, Yahoo! and MySpace announce OpenSocial Foundation
…but where's Facebook?

By Caroline McCarthy

Published: Wednesday 26 March 2008

Google, Yahoo! and News Corp's MySpace.com have announced they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a not-for-profit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites.

Agenda Setters 2007 - Top 20

Find out who made it into silicon.com's Agenda Setters top 20 by clicking the links below…

1. Mark Zuckerberg
2. Steve Jobs
3. Eric Schmidt
4. John Chambers
5. Ashley Highfield
6. Nicholas Negroponte
7. Niklas Zennström
8. Diane Greene
9. Jonathan Ive
10.Viviane Reding
11.Paul Coby
12.Marc Benioff
13.Emily Bell
14.Larry Ellison
15.Jeff Bezos
16.Ben Verwaayen
17.Nandan Nilekani
18.David Yu
19.Satoru Iwata
20.Mark Hurd

The OpenSocial Foundation is expected to be formed within 90 days, with more OpenSocial partners from across the web on board in addition to the three responsible for the announcement.

The specific purpose of the new not-for-profit, according to a release, is "to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web". It's a particularly crucial move for Google, which has been eager to emphasise OpenSocial is a community standard, not a Mountain View project.

Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said in a joint statement from the three companies: "OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning. The formation of this foundation will ensure it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open."

Indeed, the OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent entity with its own intellectual property and governance policies. Related assets are expected to be in place by the beginning of July.

Google first announced OpenSocial in October as a response to the plethora of announcements on behalf of social-networking sites that they would follow in Facebook's footsteps and create developer platforms of their own. With so many disparate developer strategies, the social-media landscape could grow even more fragmented, and Google launched the OpenSocial API (and later the Social Graph API) as a means to provide some connectivity.

Major players like Bebo, LinkedIn, MySpace and Plaxo, along with a host of smaller social networks and many that are unknown in the US, all opted to participate in the new initiative.

Some OpenSocial platforms, like foundation partner MySpace's, are already live. Others are still in testing phases or have yet to make any kind of debut.

The only major social network not to commit to OpenSocial in one way or another has been Facebook.

And Facebook won't be joining the OpenSocial Foundation, either. A statement from the company read: "As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation. The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience."

Open standards like OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID have been some of the most heated subjects of discussion in the social-media developer community over the past year.

But in a conference call with press and analysts yesterday, executives from Google, MySpace and Yahoo! asserted that the OpenSocial Foundation will be a standalone body, to the point that Google will relinquish its trademark on "OpenSocial" and the ownership of the website.

Google's Joe Kraus said: "This is just the next evolution in where OpenSocial needs to be heading, because it is a community-driven specification."