Whitehatmedia News

29/03/2008  |  Search Giants Join Forces in Social Networking Alliance

Yahoo has finally agreed to become a member of the OpenSocial Foundation, the non-profit making organisation formed to help social networking sites to compete with the numerous applications available through Facebook. Following its acquisition of web desktop company, Parakey, Facebook is rapidly emerging as a serious challenger to Google as an all-encompassing operating system. The increased competition between Google and Facebook surfaced when Facebook revealed its online advertising service, Facebook Ads, the day after Google’s original planned announcement regarding the social networking initiative.

Yahoo, allegedly, had initial concerns that Google’s leadership of the OpenSocial Foundation would give the UK’s most popular website too much control over the social networking alliance. These concerns have since been dismissed by Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google and Yahoo vice president, Wade Chambers.

OpenSocial is a more open cross-platform alternative to the Facebook model, defining a common application programming interface (API) across multiple websites.  The developers of OpenSocial are aiming to make it possible for any social networking site to host third party applications. Site users will have the ability to share photographs or play games as well as sharing many other applications between different social networking sites.

Current members of the OpenSocial Foundation include the following social networking sites: Bebo, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, NetModular, mixi, MySpace, Ning, orkut, Plaxo, Six and Apart. A number of business orientated networking sites have also joined up, including LinkedIn, Tianji, Salesforce.com, Viadeo and Oracle.