Word in the news and blogosphere is that Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial an alliance led by Google. OpenSocial provides a common set of standards that allow allow developers to create applications and services that are able run on multiple social network sites.

Google hawks OpenSocial as “many sites, one API”. Such an API would mean that developers would have less of a learning curve developing social applications and would allow these applications to run on more than one network.

From Google’s OpenSocial page

“Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.” – OpenSocial

With so much web 2.0 site launches happening on Yahoo’s properties, being able to develop social applications that can run without much modification is a good incentive for developers to create programs for use on them. How do you get users interested in your social site? You get outside developers involved and they will end up helping you gain popularity by having interesting and hopefully useful applications available for your users.

Introducing OpenSocial from YouTube (click to view more OpenSocial videos)

Let’s face it social applications and widgets are here to stay and OpenSocial provides more opportunities for developers and companies to get in front of users.

Related

Yahoo May Join Google-Led Social Networking Alliance (New York Times)

Yahoo

OpenSocial website

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