MySpace joins Google OpenSocial's sponsors

This Thursday Google announced that social networking giant MySpace will be joining the supporters of their new OpenSocial API. This makes OpenSocial into a very serious threat to Facebook, who just opened their platform to developers recently.

"OpenSocial is going to become the de facto standard (for developers) instantly out of the gates. It is going to have a reach of 200 million users, which is way bigger than anything else out there," Chris DeWolfe, chief executive and co-founder of MySpace, told reporters.

Google lost out to Microsoft last week in a bid to invest in Facebook, but now they look like having something even bigger than MySpace and Facebook combined. When OpenSocial goes live early Friday morning, it's going to be the biggest thing in social networking since Facebook was launched earlier this year. Not only will this new platform give Google a huge boost in the area, but OpenSocial will also allow anyone from small start-ups to big multi-million-dollar companies to use a standard programming interface to interact, store and manage about the user.

Update:As a testimony to the worldwide belief in the success of OpenSocial, Google shares surged to an all-time high of $713.72 on Nasdaq on Thursday, before closing at $703.21, down $3.79. This shows the investors' support of Google's operations, and the future looks bright for Google's latest addition to their online strategy.

Keep posted for more info on OpenSocial when it is released on Friday.

Google OpenSocial Launched - A New Era for Web Integration?

Although it's still unofficial, many reports show that tomorrow Google will release their new "OpenSocial" developer API. But it's more then just an API. Google plans to "out-open" Facebook with a totally new strategy of integration by opening their entire platform to third party developers. TechCrunch says:

"On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs."

This looks like it could turn into something big. I'll give you more reports on it over the week (if I can fit it in-between exams!), but for now rest assured that Google has the beginnings of something really big here. And I mean big. It just depends on who adopts it, but this has the potential to revolutionize the whole social and consumer-based development model of the web.