From our travels across cyberspace, it’s pretty clear that the social part of the Internet is becoming more and more important to people. From chat to games to messaging to sharing things like news, entertainment, pictures, maps, movies and other “favorites,” users are looking for more ways to give contacts a sense of who they are and what they’re into. As social applications take the mash-up world by storm, a growing number of companies and data sources are opening up to give people the information they want, and developers are scrambling to create new applications that connect users with friends and colleagues.

Yahoo! has always been about helping users find and share information online, and we love giving our broad and loyal developer community the tools they need to keep innovating on this front. They echo our passion for creating the best Web experience for our users.

In this same spirit, we announced today that we’ve joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard. Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages. We feel that this is the right step at this stage in its evolution. It’s no longer a trial balloon — it’s for real. We are taking this opportunity to help ensure websites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.

We already offer Web services and APIs through the Yahoo! Developer Network that make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups that integrate data sources in new ways. We think OpenSocial will continue to fuel this innovation and make the Web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions.

We can only imagine the possibilities of what creative developers and publishers will do with these tools. Stay tuned for more on how we’ll be supporting OpenSocial and driving the OpenSocial Foundation to create an open and increasingly social Web.

Wade Chambers
VP of Platforms