Back in November when Open Social was announced, we had a round of discussions in the NpTech space that summarized on my blog. Just saw a press release from Yahoo, Google, and MySpace about OpenSocial Foundation.
For now, here's the basics culled from the press release, official blog posts, and blog commentary.
The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.
The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.
The official blog posts from Yahoo and Google
Yodel Annecdotal
Google Blog
Lots of folks covering the announcement:
Read/Write Web
FaceReviews (includes analysis)
Examples of apps built on opensocial (ugh, Shelfari)
Marketing Pilgrim adds:
Facebook is steadily refusing to participate in OpenSocial or the foundation, choosing instead to support Facebook developers. Facebook is credited with starting and fueling the development of social network applications.
Google is emphasizing that OpenSocial is a community effort (or as Mozilla puts it, “a public benefit”) and not for Google’s benefit only. In true form, it has a web site (OpenSocial.org) built on Google’s new Google Sites platform. There’s also a Blogger blog for OpenSocial.
OpenSocial is creating a common API that works on multiple websites. According to the site: “The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API 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.”
Nick from Social Times adds:
My biggest problem with the standard so far has been that it’s not easy! There are multiple standards that must be supported to launch your application on MySpace and other social networks so far. It appears that this new foundation will focus on bringing together the community to help further the OpenSocial standard. A statement from Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, said “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.”
I look forward to reading what other nonprofit folks think the implications, if any, for nonprofits. If you are the Internet marketing person or responsible for your organization's web strategy, how does this impact your strategy?
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