That song especially comes to mind with Google’s OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit that was officially established this week to promote the open developer platform OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a common set of application protocol interfaces (APIs) for social networks. It’s designed to make it easy for companies to create a social network or related applications and have them work seamlessly with other social networks using the platform. (Some argue it’s also designed to compete with Facebook’s developer platform.)
And if companies aren’t comfortable with the OpenSocial premise–for fear that it’s just an anticompetitive ploy–they now have a nonprofit foundation that will help ease their mind.
“This organization seeks to ensure that OpenSocial will remain implementable by all, at no cost, in perpetuity,” wrote Dan Peterson on the OpenSocial Foundation blog.
Specifically, the foundation will provide operational guidelines about the technology and details on intellectual property as the platform changes and grows…
