Google Announces Open Social Networking

On Nov. 1st, Google announced the release of OpenSocial -- a set of common application program interfaces or APIs for building social applications across the web -- for developers of social applications and for websites that want to add social features. In a move that was expected for the last few weeks, Google's news allows developers to build widgets that take advantage of personal data and profile connections on a social-networking site. But instead of limiting the project to its own social-networking site, Orkut, Google has invited other sites along for the ride--including LinkedIn, Hi5, Plaxo, Ning, and Friendster.

Google's move is in stark contrast to Facebook, the social-networking site that has been growing quite steadily for the last year or two and now has more than 53 million active users
and an average of 250,000 new registrations per day since Jan. 2007. Facebook made some noise back in May 07 when it announced the opening of its own developer platform in May but has kept developer activity restricted to its own service (and has since signed an exclusive ad deal with Microsoft in exchange for an equity investment). When other social networks began to announce their own "platform strategies" this fall, concerns were raised that developers would have to create a completely new application for each site. That could prove inefficient and costly, especially for smaller developers working on a limited budget.