Google's OpenSocial initiative to establish common, standard APIs for creating social-networking applications is still in its early days. But its impact for end users, developers, Web site owners, social-network operators and even business application vendors could be huge in the long run.

Open standards always cause security problems and Google's OpenSocial API introduced last week is no exception. Not only was an early application based on the standard hacked within minutes, it quickly became evident that OpenSocial is vulnerable and offers an open door to anyone who wants to put a little effort into pushing it open.

Modular social networking gadget specifications now allow use beyond pure social networking applications, offering both a core and social set of data models, APIs and gadgets

eXo has announced the release of eXo Social 1.0, an enterprise social networking package which supports OpenSocial, under an AGPL licence

So, you've heard about Google's free software release of its Gadgets server, and the new Open Social. And gosh, wouldnt it be nice if you could provide this technology to your users with your favorite free software Content Management System (CMS)?

Today Yahoo! officially introduced their "open strategy" platform, Y!OS. The Yahoo! Open Strategy platform consists of three development components, the Yahoo! Application Platform, the Yahoo! Social Platform, and the Yahoo! Query Language.

TweetDeck is an adobe air application that helps us to perform all the online social networking activities using a single platform. It comes as a personal real time browser for connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more...

Elgg is an open source application for rolling out a social network. It installs like any Web-based software, but instead of a blog or a wiki, it gives you all the components of a social networking site -- your own MySpace!

On Tuesday, Rick Spencer announced on the Ubuntu developers mailing list that Ubuntu has entered a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! and will make Yahoo! the default search engine. Well, I believe the community should have been consulted.