Sunnyvale, California-based Web pioneer Yahoo announced Tuesday that it will join an alliance, formed by  competitor Google in October 2007, to try making it easier for programmers to popularize their applications on multiple social networking and other Web sites. Joined by leading social networking site MySpace and others, the alliance will create a non-profit organization within the next three months to be called the OpenSocial Foundation, with the Mountain View, California-based search leader relinquishing its control of the group, Google said Tuesday. Developers of so-called widget applications for social networking sites, which include features such as favorite book and movie listings and virtual gifts, will have a potential audience of more than 500 million people with the alliance's addition of Yahoo, the most visited Web portal among United States consumers. An Effort To Save Developers Time and Money By adding Yahoo, the OpenSocial Foundation will have expanded the group's reach significantly from the 100 million or so users who could potentially be reached when the Google driven initiative launched less than six months ago largely as a response to the rapidly growing site Facebook. Microsoft's  Windows Live Spaces and Facebook will be the only major social networking sites that haven't joined the OpenSocial movement, which also includes AOL's Bebo and Google's Orkut networking sites. Since the formation of the alliance the makers of some popular Facebook applications have made their code compatible with the OpenSocial framework or are planning to do so in an effort to save time and money. "OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning," said Google director of product management Joe Kraus in a statement released Tuesday. "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," Kraus added. Facebook and Microsoft Remain Holdouts Former Google executive Sheryl Sandberg recently left the search firm to become the new chief operating officer at Facebook, following other executives and programmers making the move from Google to Facebook, and adding to a growing rivalry between the two firms. Facebook, which has an advertising agreement with Microsoft and which last year received $240 million in backing from the world's largest software firm, has no immediate plans to join the independent OpenSocial Foundation. "Facebook is not joining this foundation, but  the company remains focused on advancing [the] Facebook Platform to benefit the developer community and help users communicate and share information more efficiently," said Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker in a recent New York Times report. This comes despite recent comments from members of the OpenSocial Foundation that Facebook would be a welcome member of the group, including Yahoo vice president for platforms Wade Chambers, who said that "any large player should be open to participate" in the alliance. The announcement of Yahoo's addition to the OpenSocial group may be a sign that the movement is gaining momentum after a somewhat sluggish start last year, and comes at the very time Facebook is experiencing rapid growth. Google said that the addition of Yahoo to the group and its role as a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation represented "landmarks" for the alliance. OpenSocial Foundation May Boost MySpace During January Facebook saw its visitor numbers increase to 100.7 million, a fourfold gain from a year earlier,  while MySpace saw a more modest visitor increase of 15 percent, to 109.3 million, according to Web traffic analysis firm comScore. Members of the forthcoming OpenSocial Foundation will undoubtedly be looking to make it easier for developers to create new applications for a social networking market that saw more than twice the spending come its way in 2007 than the previous year. Nearly 20,000 social networking applications operate in the Facebook environment, which has about 67 million active users worldwide, trailing the 78 million people rival MySpace counts as regular users worldwide. The OpenSocial group offers developers a slate of programming specifications available under the popular Creative Commons copyright license and access to an open source reference implementation called Shindig, developed in the Apache Software Foundation to make for speedier development times. Yahoo Joins Google and MySpace in OpenSocial Alliance Some analysts see Yahoo's decision to join the OpenSocial Foundation as a deliberate snub to Microsoft, which is pursuing a drawn-out attempt to purchase Yahoo. Yahoo has not yet released details regarding which  of its online properties will become available to developers through the OpenSocial program, although its engineers along with those from Google and MySpace will "continue to work together and with the OpenSocial community to further advance the specification through the new foundation," according to Google. "Yahoo believes in supporting community-driven industry specifications and expects that OpenSocial will fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users," Chambers said in Tuesday's statement. "Our support builds on similar efforts with the OpenID community and will expand the opportunity for developers and publishers to benefit from an open and increasingly social web," he added. Besides providing potential benefits to developers, the OpenSocial group aims to make it easier for people to combine their online identities and profiles from social networking Web sites and seamlessly use the information at a limitless number of other Web sites. Related Links:
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10:14 pm on Mar. 26, 2008 (utc 0)