Two weeks ago there were reports that Yahoo was planning to join Google’s OpenSocial application platform. A day later we heard that the final decision had been made, but it wouldn’t be announced for a while, probably in April.
Well, they beat that projection by a week. Today Yahoo announced their support for the platform. But they are also, along with Google and MySpace, forming a new non-profit organization called the OpenSocial Foundation. It is modeled after the OpenID Foundation. The goal, they say, is that by placing the assets into a new non-profit, they’ll be able to say they will maintain absolute neutrality while keeping a straight face.
Developers and website owners are also being pointed to the OpenSocial Foundation website for current specifications and links to other resources.
Engineers from all three founding entities will work on the project, they say. All specifications are available under a creative commons copyright license. Also an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator.
The press release for this is here. We will also be on a briefing call later this morning with our live notes.
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