Google Leading Open, Social Apps Effort

Google and others (Plaxo, Ning, Oracle, LinkedIn and more) have banded together to create a common, open development platform for applications on social networks: “OpenSocial.” This basically does what Facebook has done but in a broader context, with more parties involved.

Facebook is unlikely to join this effort (at least short term) but more interesting is the possibility that MySpace would join. Since I just landed in Amsterdam, I’ll kick it over to:

• John Battelle with the press release
• Danny Sullivan
• Michael Arrington/TechCrunch
  
• The New York Times’ Brad Stone & Miguel Helft
• Kevin Delaney, WSJ

One thing that I will say is that this effort marks how far Google has come from the days, just a couple years ago, when it declined to buy MySpace for half of what Rupert Murdoch reportedly paid for it.

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Here’s Ning’s Marc Andreessen blogging about the initiative and why he thinks it’s better for developers and advertisers than Facebook platform. I previously described Facebook as seeking to effectively become “AOL 2.0″ and this OpenSocial effort sure makes the company now appear that way.