[Updated 13.30 1/11/2007; 2/11/2007]
In the mid 1990s Marc Andreessen was one of the originally developers of Netscape, the browser that enabled the World Wide Web to take off in the mass way that it did. In June I wrote something about Ning, a promising looking commercial platform for supporting social networks which Andreessen founded with Gina Bianchini.
Here is a 31/10/2007 "top level technical" piece by Andreessen about Google's about-to-launch OpenSocial, which seems to provide a way for suppliers of social networking applications to make their applications work with each other, and for developers of individual components for social networking applications to make them work on any participating social networking platform. There is also a follow up post by Andreesson, with a screen-cast showing OpenSocial in action, for which thanks to Simon Grant; and this piece in the New York Times (via The Register) picks up on the fact that MySpace and Bebo, two of the largest social networking services are tied into OpenSocial.
Today Google is itself silent on OpenSocial, but from the tone of Andreessen's piece, that will change very soon. (It has). Expect serious concerns to emerge about privacy and the sharing/re-use of personal data.
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