New York Times is reporting that Yahoo! is seriously considering plans to join the Google-led OpenSocial Alliance that is developing a common set of standards so developers can create programs that run on many social networks and other Web sites. NYT gets this bit of information from a source with direct knowledge of Yahoo!’s plans. The OpenSocial Alliance already has MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites to its fold since its launch sometime last year.

A Yahoo! spokeswoman who neither denied nor confirmed the rumour saying it was evaluating “OpenSocial as an emerging standard” did say that, “Yahoo! has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole.”

OpenSocial alliance is seen as a counterweight to Facebook’s successful courtship of application developers and as Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research, said, Yahoo!’s participation “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial”.

Yahoo! may not benefit directly from the alliance since it is not a social networking site but it could benefit from third party “social” applications that, for example, allow users to share their favourite photos, music or movies with their friends. Many of the creators of popular applications on Facebook have already said they plan to also adapt their programs to conform with the OpenSocial standard.