Several leading social networking sites, including MySpace, have stated they welcome the idea of applications being written by third-party developers, which can be downloaded and utilised by their members.
However, there’s no means for applications to be easily shared at present with other sites. Currently, developers like those who created the popular music recommendation service iLike are made to write separate code - for each site on which they wish their app to be available - a liability Google’s OpenSocial alliance expects can be handled. The addition of Internet major Yahoo! to Google’s OpenSocial means that Windows Live Spaces, Facebook and Microsoft’s portal, are now among the only top networking sites yet to join the project.
MySpace that has 78 million users worldwide, Orkut, Google’s popular networking site, as well as Bebo, recently bought by AOL, have all become part of it Yahoo!, on its part, has taken several measures recently to hint that it intends carrying on with its business as usual despite having to fend off Microsoft’s aggressive offer. Under the terms of the agreement with Google, it will sign on the ‘Open Social’ alliance, It will collaborate with other leading Internet biggies like MySpace owned by News Corporation, - parent company of Times Online - for developing a set of standards, which developers can utilise across all social networking web sites.