Google opensocial aims to become the social platform glue

At the start of this month, Google released standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs) for building social applications that will work across social networking and other Web sites. So as a developer, write once, integrate with many.

Here are some of the companies that have signed up: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. (Most of these are consumer sites, but some are business sites.)

This could be seen as a face-off between Facebook's platform (representing 50 million active users) vs OpenSocial (which leverages users of existing silioed services which together represent 100 million users). However Google is stressing this is an developer platform (rather than commercial one).

Hello? Identity management standard in another guise??

Nice point from this Gartner analyst in this article:

What's missing, said Valdes, is any common user experience, which he believes is one of the reasons that Facebook has prospered.

Also Facebook represents a trusted brand - with privacy standards & trust, as well as a similar consumer experience. A set of APIs alone doesn't represent that.