28 March 2008
Yahoo said on Tuesday that it is backing a program by rival Google to make software work fluidly across different social networks, and will create a joint foundation to promote the effort.
The normally fierce competitors are working together in the OpenSocial network, which Google formed in November to lure web software developers and other social network sites away from the emerging market leader in social networks, Facebook.
Many social networks — including News Corp's MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn — support OpenSocial, a set of technical specifications that lets software developers build applications such as games and photo shows that can run on any social network, expanding the audience for such software.
However, neither Facebook nor Microsoft, which gave Facebook $240m (£120m) in backing last year, has signed up to support OpenSocial. Microsoft, which has mounted a $42bn hostile takeover bid for Yahoo, also has an agreement to sell advertising on Facebook's site. Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li commented:
There is only one place developers go right now, and that is Facebook,OpenSocial makes it easier for everybody else to get in the game.
The scope of OpenSocial is increasing and OpenSocial applications reach more than 200 million users, Joe Kraus, a Google director of product management, said in a conference call. Supporter MySpace alone counts 110 million active users.
Yahoo, Google and MySpace also said on Tuesday that they will create the OpenSocial Foundation to maintain a neutral, community-governed forum for developing applications. It will be set up as a not-for-profit entity, with assets to be assigned to the new organisation by 1 July 2008.
Facebook, which has had the greatest momentum among social networks in attracting new users over the past year, has remained aloof from OpenSocial. It offers its own simple set of technical specifications for application developers. Independent developers have built 19,000 applications that run inside Facebook, which now has 67 million active users.
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