Open social

"Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook ", NY Times

"...an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards [open api's] to allow software developers to write programs for Google's social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.

The alliance includes business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle, who are moving to let third-party programmers write applications that can be accessed by their customers."