WebProNews

Google Lets You Take Contacts With You

Google has begun implementing Portable Contacts, an open standard that aims to make it easier to access your contacts in a secure way when sites ask you to invite friends when you sign up.

Working Toward Activity Stream Standards

In San Francisco last night, Six Apart (who recently launched data portability initiative Motion) hosted a roundtable to discuss the future of activity stream standards. In attendance were people from Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, Nokia, Plaxo, Comcast, and others.

Ning Gets In On the OpenSocial Initiative

Ning has followed in the footsteps of other social networking services like MySpace, Friendster, Bebo, and Hi5, and started to integrate with Google Code initiative OpenSocial, the platform that "defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites."

Friendster Gets Friendly with Facebook

Friendster announced today that it is now supporting both Facebook and Opensocial apps. Integration with these has now become part of the Friendster Developer Program, though they've been supporting OpenSocial since August.

OpenSocial Gets AOL

In the apparent battle between Google's OpenSocial and Facebook, Bebo more or less threw up its hands and joined both sides.  Now its new corporate parent, AOL, is backing OpenSocial.

Google Previews Friend Connect

There is a trend emerging: online giants making it so users can take their social networks with them anywhere they go on the web, sort of like digital carpooling. Google threw in its offering today, or will tonight anyway, with Google Friend Connect, a wash-n-wear service for incorporating social networking into non-social-networking websites.

Developers Asked To Play In iGoogle Sandbox

In a recent post that was about 125 words long, a Googler included the term "social" four times.  Keep Facebook, MySpace, and whatever else you like in mind, then, while learning about a new developer sandbox for iGoogle.

Yahoo Welcomed Into OpenSocial

Brace yourself: the words "Welcome, Yahoo!" have appeared on the Official Google Blog.  This isn't some merger- or search-related announcement, however; Yahoo instead joined OpenSocial.

Yahoo May Sign Up For OpenSocial

What counts most major social networks - and Yahoo - among its members?  Official confirmation is still lacking, but later this year, maybe Google OpenSocial.

FindMeOn Upset With Google Over OpenSocial

Most lawsuits against Google seem to be the result of badly planned get-rich-quick schemes.  A complaint from FindMeOn may have something to it, however, and centers on the similarities between Google's OpenSocial and the smaller company's Open Social Networking (OpenSN).