As much anticipated, Yahoo is joining the Google-led Open Social Alliance, which is developing a common set of standards for programmers to create applications that can run on social networks and other sites. It is a non-profit group whose founding members will include Google, Yahoo and MySpace, another large backer of Open Social. For the past several months Yahoo has been considering joining the alliance but their executives felt that Google might exert too much control over the evolution of Open Social and any intellectual property created by the group. After some time, Google has agreed to give up control over Open Social.
Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google, said the foundation represents "more an evolution of where Open Social is heading" than a response to concern raised by any other member. This was brought up after a conference with Google and Yahoo executives when there was an idea that the foundation was created in response to Yahoo's concerns. The alliance was formed last fall as a counterweight to Facebook, which has successfully courted thousands of application developers. The creators of many of the most popular Facebook applications have said they plan to adapt their programs to make them compatible with the Open Social standard.
This is an example of several large companies coming together to achieve a common goal. Google is not trying to dominate the movement as they have said but rather working together on an even level with other companies. Yahoo provided no details about when or how it would implement the Open Social standard. So far, only MySpace and Orkut, Google's social network, have introduced Open Social on their sites.
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