This is great news for Google’s Open Social. The Open Social movement continues to increase. AOL purchased social media site BEBO for $850 Million in March. This was a big move into social media by AOL and many developers were wondering if the site would join the growing party on Google’s Open Social standard.

Bebo was one of the first sites of significant size to join Open Social. Google is looking to create a common social networking platform for developers of widgets, gadgets and other apps. My AOL gives them even more momentum and a way to easily port lot’s of widgets over to the Open Social standard.

At Google’s developers’ conference, known as IO 2008, AOL software engineer Eric Staats said AOL would open up the API for its My AOL network so that developers can create apps for AOL users.

Staats said: “We want to make a change, we want to embrace you, the developers, so… My AOL is going to become a gadget container in the near future”. An exact time frame for when this will occur was not given, but I would suspect to see something within a few months this summer.

My AOL (“Start the day with your personalized home page and check on the pulse of the world according to you.”) which was launched last year; is similar to MyYahoo and iGoogle which lets users inside AOL’s walled garden access its “gadgets/widgets”. Hey,if AOL can open up, can facebook be far behind?

My AOL has ~20 million users spread across 55 portals in 16 countries, according to Staats. What all this means is more major players are joining Google and this is a great thing for actually creating a real internet standard. This is great news for many marketers and brands that want to reach an ever growing audience appetite for these “widgets”.

This will effectively means that a great inventory of widgets will be easily released into the wild from behind the confines of AOL after some development time of porting into the Open Social container structure..

Technorati Tags: open social, my AOL

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