Google announced today in conjunction with Yahoo! and MySpace, the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit entity, “dedicated to the sustainable and open development of the OpenSocial initiative and related intellectual property.” It’s a shrewd move by the three that leaves Facebook in an even lonelier place inside its walled garden.

In its prospectus, Google outlined several expectancies of the foundation. The requirements are thus:

The OpenSocial initiative has reached a point where it must simultaneously (a) put in place sufficient legal structure to provide authors and implementers with the necessary assurances concerning intellectual property, licensing, and logistical concerns, (b) create a scalable and sustainable model for efficient future growth of the technical specifications, and (c) support the ongoing need for the principal stakeholders to ship working and interoperable implementations.

In meeting these needs, the OpenSocial Foundation will be structured to include both corporate and individual representation, and to foster a transparent and participatory community for the purpose of providing equal access to specifications published by the OpenSocial Foundation, at no charge.

Based on these factors, several responsibilities have been attributed to the initiative:

The implications of this, not to be dramatic, are somewhat thunderous. Google has been struggling to establish OpenSocial as a community initiative, but until this rallying of players, most people have looked at it as something potentially useful, but something irrevocably Google. Establishing a non-profit entity to manage the OpenSocial initiative is something of a masterstroke. It reduces the presence of Google as overlord of the platform, but still opens the data to the only things Google really cares about: indexing, searching and advertising.

What we’re seeing here is a turning point in the existence of Google. It’s “do no evil,” moniker, while not revoked, is rendered irrelevant in this situation. There is an element of brilliance in business this cunning that makes it hard to hate. Google deals in information, a brilliant business in its own right since information is infinite, and in all cases, it will facilitate creative ways to make that information available. Whether its influencing terms of the 700Mhz spectrum, or making it cool to make social networks more open, it’s all been well played so far — so far.

Read more about Yahoo & OpenSocial on the official google blog here.

Technorati Tags: Google, OpenSocial, Myspace, Yahoo!, Facebook, data portability

Share this on: