• The New York Times, Wednesday, March 12, 2008 12:15 PM

Yahoo plans to join Google's OpenSocial, possibly as early as this week. OpenSocial is an alliance that aims to develop common standards so developers can create programs that run across many social networks and other Web sites. Yahoo, with its enormous user base, offers "a counterweight" to social networking giant Facebook's own closed platform. The Google-led alliance already includes MySpace, Bebo and several other social networking sites.

Yahoo confirmed that it was evaluating OpenSocial, but would not say when or if it planned to join the emerging standard. A company spokeswoman said, "Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole."

Joining OpenSocial would be in line with Yahoo's strategy to open itself up to outside developers. The idea is that third-party social media Web apps would help improve Yahoo's portal-like features.

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