OpenSocial

Yahoo joined the OpenSocial collaboration (launched in November 2007 by Google) this week, joining partners MySpace, LinkedIn, et. al.

Facebook is the 800lb. gorilla in the room not participating in the OpenSocial cooperative. Facebook received an equity purchase from Microsoft and is a formidable competitor to Google for eyeballs & ads. Shrewd move, Redmond, to create a wall of enmity between these two. But Google read a page from the GNU book of knowledge, opening their Orkut app API to be an open alliance with open standards & open source software.

You'll see criticism of how "open" OpenSocial is and how standard, too; this should be expected, and I'll watch how it all pans out. This group of (Google-led) companies is still trying to figure out how to interoperate with developers, while maintaining security and preserving the focus and mission of their communities and web properties.

How does this affect the webmaster? OpenSocial support could be integrated into web development frameworks like Zope or content management systems like Drupal. DrupalJedi says "all web site developers need to be familiar with this standard;" I agree that being aware is required; let's see how it grows.