Yahoo joins open social- what?

This article is too good to be summarized, so I’ll let you juggle the real stuff.

Yahoo Inc. is joining MySpace and Google Inc. in endorsing technical specifications for building social applications across the Web.

The move shows the broadening scope of the OpenSocial initiative, an effort by these companies to provide common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different Web sites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the Web sites. The result is what Yahoo, MySpace and Google termed “a vast distribution platform for social applications.”

Yahoo’s announcement Tuesday could also put pressure on Facebook, the closely held social network that so far has not signed on to the effort.

Yahoo called itself a “founding member” of the foundation, which is planned to be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework. Related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1.

The foundation will focus on issues including technology, documentation and intellectual property.

Social applications — which let users do things such as see the music friends are listening to and share photo slideshows - have emerged as a popular activity for users of social networking sites, and a potentially powerful vehicle for delivering advertisements. Prior to OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site.

Google introduced the initiative to put pressure on Facebook and MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Facebook offers its own specifications for software developers and the over 7,000 such add-on applications for its site have contributed to Facebook’s popularity and usage.

Steve Pearman, MySpace’s senior vice president of product strategy, said, “Yahoo is an important addition to the OpenSocial movement, and through this foundation we will work together to provide developers with the tools to make the Internet move faster and to foster more innovation and creativity.”

The foundation also announced it launched its Web site, opensocial.org, which is intended to serve as “the portal for the community to find all information about OpenSocial and the foundation as they evolve.”