Yahoo Contracts Open Social Disease
With Microsoft’s (MSFT) hostile bid looking more and more like an inevitability, Yahoo (YHOO) has apparently decided it’s got nothing to lose by joining Google’s (GOOG) “Everybody-But-Facebook Coalition.”
This morning the company threw its support behind OpenSocial–a Google-led initiative to foster interoperability between social applications–and with MySpace (NWS) and Google, it announced the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the mitigation of perceptions that Google will use OpenSocial for its own benefit.
“… Today … we’ve joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard,” Yahoo VP of Platforms Wade Chambers said in a post to Yahoo Anecdotal. “Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages. We feel that this is the right step at this stage in its evolution. It’s no longer a trial balloon–it’s for real. We are taking this opportunity to help ensure Web sites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.”
