A Tech Moment: OpenSocial Foundation
On Tuesday, March 25, Yahoo announced it was joining forces with Google and MySpace to form the OpenSocial Foundation. This foundation is intended to be “an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework,” and “…will be structured to include both corporate and individual representation, and to foster a transparent and participatory community for the purpose of providing equal access to specifications published by the OpenSocial Foundation, at no charge.” The hard work and efforts of the millions of content developers that have been working competitively against each other and independently from one another will now work collaboratively together, in the true spirit of open source and social networking.
What does this mean to you and me? It means that now, instead of having to choose between a Yahoo! map and a Google map application, they are united as one, presumably better and more powerful. Instead of being divided across virtual communities (“You use Yahoo? Oh…I use Google…” ), developers for these programs will all be united as one big community, reaching out to millions more. The OpenSocial Foundation is planned to launch July 2008; we should expect many great efforts to arise from this project in the future.