Yahoo, Google, MySpace form non-profit OpenSocial Foundation
This post was expanded at 8:43 AM PT, and comment from Facebook was added. — It's like the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.'s MySpace.com announced on Tuesday that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation …
Context & Ripple Effects
OpenSocial began as Google's bid to create a shared universe for social applications, with MySpace, Bebo and SixApart joining the effort in 2007. Yahoo's possible entry was reported earlier in March; its formal participation turns a Google-led alliance into a three-company nonprofit.
The alliance has been framed against Facebook's position in social networking, including in coverage of Google's competitive concern about Facebook. A separate foundation gives the participating services a vehicle to govern OpenSocial beyond any one member's product decisions.
First-order effects
- Google, Yahoo and MySpace move OpenSocial's stewardship into a nonprofit foundation, giving their joint effort a formal governance structure.
- Yahoo becomes a committed OpenSocial participant rather than a prospective ally, broadening the set of major services attached to the initiative.
Second-order effects
- Facebook faces a more coordinated alternative from Google, Yahoo and MySpace, which can present developers with a common social-application framework across their services.
- Developers building for the participating networks gain a clearer incentive to target OpenSocial rather than maintain separate integrations for each service.
Third-order effects
- If the foundation keeps members aligned, social-network competition may shift partly from attracting users to controlling the standards and developer interfaces through which applications reach them.
- The arrangement illustrates an open social-network alliance using nonprofit governance to pool distribution while its largest members continue to compete for users and developers.
The trend: Major web platforms are using shared standards and nonprofit governance to build developer ecosystems that can counter a dominant social-network platform.