OpenSocial

As most of you might have known already, OpenSocial has been launched by Google along with some of the other members of the social networking web community. OpenSocial seeks to provide a common set of APIs based on Javascript and HTML that developers can use to pull social data from websites who are confirming to the OpenSocial interface.

As of now, the web community consists of Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING apart from Google.

This move from Google seems to be another attempt by Google to make themselves relevant in the social networking community. Google's flagship product Orkut, which was Google's attempt to capture the social networking market is believed to have not been able to live up to the expectations. And with the onslaught by Facebook and Myspace, things have not been easy for Google.

Though one things that is curious to me is how obsessed are people with US based users/customers. Though Orkut has a great following in India, it has been judged as not good enough just because Orkut has not been able to grasp more US based users compared to Facebook. It seems the users in countries like India have been taken for granted or are considered not worthy enough.

BTW, for people curious about OpenSocial here is a video that explains the same.