Here are a couple of projects working on some of the issues brought up in my previous post on social networks.

Googles Open Social

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

In order for developers to get started immediately, Orkut has opened a limited sandbox that you can use to start building apps using the OpenSocial APIs.

Data Portability

As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors. We need a DHCP for Identity. A distributed File System for data. The technologies already exist, we simply need a complete reference design to put the pieces together.

To put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end Data Portability. To promote that design to the developer, vendor and end-user community.

Today Microsoft offered to purchase yahoo! WTF? If this happens they might have a chance at challenging Google. This could be interesting. If this happens then you could see yahoo becoming very integrated into the Windows OS.

While “The Google” has recently been working hand in hand with Apple on iPhone apps. And as Merlin Mann of 43folders has pontificated, he thinks that Apple and Google will be working closer and closer together in the future.

Could this be a preemptive move by Microsoft to make the Google/Apple collaboration more difficult? It’s an interesting thought. We’ll just have to wait and watch as this unfolds.

Microsoft Offers To Buy Yahoo For $31/Share

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