Google opens up social networking

Google rarely gets shown up by Microsoft, but the $240 million investment in Facebook by the Redmond giant last week may have played a small part in Google's move to open social networking APIs. OpenSocial brings together such diverse services as Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Salesforce.com. But while opening up APIs, or any software platform, has historically proven to be a good thing, it's interesting that all of the networks involved in the venture are looked upon as also-rans, even Google's own Orkut. All of them, that is, except Salesforce, which is an online juggernaut in its own space but seems out of step with the other OpenSocial partners.

UPDATE: Myspace has just joined OpenSocial. Clearly, this changes the equation just a bit.