Miscellaneous

OpenSocial creates foundation; continues to license specifications under CC-BY

By Timothy Vollmer

Yesterday Google, MySpace, and newest partner Yahoo! announced the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit organization that works “to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.” From the press release:

The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.

OpenSocial continues to release all specifications under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

OpenSocial defines a common API (application programming interface) for social applications across multiple websites. OpenSocial helps developers avoid reinventing the wheel by “providing common ‘plumbing’ that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.”

Read the OpenSocial Foundation press release here.

Full post as published by Creative Commons.org on March 26, 2008 (boomark / email).