• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, November 2, 2007

Eager to challenge Facebook's rising star, MySpace has joined the Google-led initiative to court Web developers with an open system for creating social networking applications.

Named OpenSocial, the initiative is simply a set of common APIs for building social applications across the Web. The idea is to give Web developers standardized tools for writing applications and embedding them on social networkers' personal pages.

"Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform," Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and CEO MySpace, said in a statement released late Thursday.

As a member of OpenSocial, MySpace is providing the group with platform experience and user mass, as it is still the most popular social network online.

Google had signed on more than a dozen other partners--including social networks like hi5, Friendster, and LinkedIn, along with software makers like Oracle and Salesforce.com--reaching a combined 100 million people.

"MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web," Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, said in a statement. "We're thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative."

Facebook opened up to outside developers in May, and since then thousands of applications have been attached to the site; those applications are credited with helping increase its community to more than 48 million users.

Still without a dominant position in the social marketing space, Google is hoping it can leverage the developer community and establish a standard for their community.

"With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the Web social," a Google spokesman said Wednesday.