• Reuters, Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11 AM

Yahoo on Tuesday joined News Corp.'s MySpace, AOL's Bebo, Friendster, LinkedIn and ten other companies by joining the Google-led open social networking initiative, OpenSocial. As part of its entry into the Google network, which offers technical specifications that let software developers build applications that run across any social network, Yahoo also became a founding member of the OpenSocial Foundation, along with Google and MySpace. The nonprofit group will be devoted to maintaining a neutral, community-based forum for building applications. An undisclosed range of assets will be assigned to the new entity by July 1.

Emerging market leader Facebook is still the most notable absentee from OpenSocial. Google rival Microsoft, which sells ads on Facebook and has invested $240 million in the company, has also stayed away. Even so, Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li says that Facebook is the only viable destination for application developers at the moment. "OpenSocial makes it easier for everybody else to get in the game," she said.

But OpenSocial is building considerable scope, with a network that now reaches more than 200 million users (half of which come from MySpace). As Joe Kraus, Google's director of product development, said during a conference call: "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together."

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