OpenSocial Bonanza

Yahoo!, MySpace and Google announced the creation of the OpenSocial Foundation today. The foundation is a non-profit entity aimed at ensuring “…open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property.”

On the final day of SXSW Interactive 2008, we were lucky enough to sit down with Kevin Marks from Google’s OpenSocial project. Kevin broke down what OpenSocial is, where it is going (MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut among others had already signed on as of our interview) and what the plans are for the future. We’ll be posting our interview with Marks shortly.

In the meantime, you can read more about the new foundation after the jump
Google held a conference call outling outlining the Foundation and proposal this afternoon and here are some of the highlights:

• The OpenSocial Foundation (OSF) wants to foster success for all parties and social networks
• The OSF aims to provide a safe harbor intellectual property zone
• The OSF will ensure that OpenSocial remains free forever and community driven (with no one party or company having undue influence)
• It will bet setup within the next 90 days
• Google is contributing the trademark and website for OpenSocial to the foundation
• Non-assertion convenance patents will be signed by all parties to protect the IP of container and application developers

So basically, the foundation is being created to keep transparency and parity in the OpenSocial community as the project expands.

OpenSocial will be present at the Google I/O in San Francisco May 28 & 29.