Word is now out that a Google led alliance will launch OpenSocial on Thursday. OpenSocial is a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including declared partners LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning. Unlike Facebook which uses its own markup language, developers for OpenSocial will be free to use Flash, html and javascript.
By pulling together with with Salesforce.com and Oracle, who are moving to let third-party programmers write applications that can be accessed by their customers, Google hopes to create a rival platform that could have broad appeal to developers. The alliance and partner pact potentially has a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.
Microsoft recently took a $240million stake in Facebook, valuing the media darling social site at $15billion, despite the fact that it does not make money.
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[...] November, Google released their OpenSocial APIs – a common set of APIs for building social applications that allow developers to have a standard [...]