opensocial

What counts most major social networks - and Yahoo - among its members?  Official confirmation is still lacking, but later this year, maybe Google OpenSocial.

Facebook appears to be trying to gain some ground against Google’s as-yet-unreleased OpenSocial effort by opening up its developer platform for other sites to use.

Google’s OpenSocial has been both laughed at and fawned over as people have debated if it has any value.  The discussion will, by and large, continue, but the people at Plaxo have already decided that OpenSocial is extremely good.

Whether it’s from reading reports or scoping out the sites ourselves, most of us have a pretty good feel for various social networks - how big they are, who’s joined them, and so on.  New statistics from Rapleaf don’t really shake things up, but they do provide some interesting insights.

In case you missed this news, Google’s OpenSocial API went live now (oh, and MySpace is now an official OpenSocial partner too, making Google-competitor Facebook come off as anti-social if they don’t join). The FAQ explains that...

As information came out about OpenSocial, the facts concerning Google’s new networking project seemed to grow less clear, instead of more.  Everyone’s now had a bit of time to look the matter over, though, and consider the implications of the deal.

When Google’s OpenSocial was considered a collection of social networking outsiders, the smart money seemed to favor its competitors, Facebook and MySpace.  But now that MySpace has partnered with OpenSocial, we’re left to wonder whether Facebook will join, as well.

MySpace is adding some serious clout to Google's freshly launched OpenSocial. The popular social networking site has signed on to be a part of  Google's APIs for creating social applications on the Web.