The launch of the OpenSocial Foundation yesterday puts Google, Yahoo, and MySpace in one corner with Facebook in the other. It's useful, I think, to take a look at what exactly this new alliance is supposed to accomplish, and why the biggest player in the social-networking space might refuse to join it. The group's stated mission is to (a) protect the "intellectual property" rights to any standards developed in the soc-net space and (b) pull together a pool of resources to fund that development. The goal, in the end, is to create an industry standard that makes it more efficient for the developers of the next Scrabulous to port their creation from one network to the next.

But what the new entity doesn't do is to go the open-source route, turning over the development of those standards to the developer community who will be building the apps and widgets that will run in those spaces. It seems to me that what we're looking at is less a nod to open-source than it is an industry agreement amongst major players, like Ford and GM getting together to decide the specifications for wheel rims so that tire makers can make a product that fits a wide variety of cars. It's as good for the consumer as it would be if the printer industry came up with a standard for ink cartridges.

While on Capitol Hill, I worked a bit on an effort to push forward some minimum security standards in the software industry. One of the tricks in the toolbox of the federal government on this front is that it's such a major consumer of software. It can demand that products meet its security requirements, and in the end developers sometimes find it easier to just build their standard consumer-grade products to meet them. Facebook, it seems, is betting that it's so dominant for so long in the social-networking space that developers will find it in their best interest to shape their work to meet Facebook's needs.