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Google is introducing new standards for interfacing with social networking sites. OpenSocial is a set of (soon to be posted) APIs that allow developers to create web applications and widgets that integrate with social networks. It’s an open alternative to the Facebook application platform. Thousands of Facebook applications have been developed and used by millions, helping to fuel Facebook's growth, since the platform was introduced five months ago.

Google announced yesterday that OpenSocial will be launched tomorrow (November 1). Likely to be very significant, the announcement has been referred to as one of the two Silicon Valley earthquakes occurring yesterday (in addition to the magnitude 5.6 quake that struck there). Partners at launch will include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Friendster, and Oracle. The New York Times had an article on the story today, and Mark Anderson (co-founder of Netscape and Ning) has posted a detailed article on his blog, and a screencast of OpenSocial in action.

The future is open. Google has a great strategy of developing open APIs that appeal to independent developers, and offering its services through them. OpenSocial is just one example. Expect to see similar things from Google in the future. They may take it to the next level very soon by introducing a mobile platform, which is likely to be an open operating system and APIs for mobile devices, rather than a single Google phone. That may be why Apple suddenly announced plans to allow independent iPhone application development beginning in February.

OpenSocial will allow social networks and other web sites to interact, and to use and display dynamic information about users; including their interests, friends, and activities. This might help people to stay in touch by allowing us to show selected friends our recent photos, current location, schedule, or private discussions. Friends-of-friends might get to see the films we've rated on Netflix and those waiting to arrive from our queue, or the music we're listening to, while people that we don't have connections with could be shown less information. Hopefully, this will allow easy use of many new social features and interaction with the users and activities on different sites without the need to enroll in each of them.

We can now expect to quickly see many more interesting developments in social networking. Google will benefit from the increased activity by having more page views to display ads on, and perhaps by having more information to better target those ads.