What’s OpenSocial?

Recently, I’ve seen tons of news articles on something called OpenSocial.  This didn’t really jump out at me till I saw it associated with Google.  Then Friendster.  Then Myspace.  And then, I discovered it was rivaling Facebook’s developers’ applications.  What’s OpenSocial got to do with this?

OpenSocial is a united way to develop applications that will work with social-networking sites.  Think Myspace, with those funny Facebook applications like Free Gifts and whatnot.  Either way, since these sites will all be united by OpenSocial, would the possibility of an application working on all the sites be likely?  And even with Facebook 7,000 applications ahead, will OpenSocial be able to catch up?

If you ask me, I think OpenSocial is just another way Google’s fighting back against Facebook and Microsoft (they’re business partners now) by joining forces with various social networking sites, namely Myspace.  All I’m going to say is this gets more interesting by the second!