Yahoo Joins Google Social Network Alliance

Yahoo will join Google in developing the latter's open social networking framework OpenSocial, the company announced yesterday. The two giants, along with other partners, also announced the creation of a foundation to oversee the effort. Neither Facebook nor Microsoft, which have an advertising agreement, are part of OpenSocial; Facebook on its own already has 19,000 independent applications developed for its platform.

"There is only one place developers go right now, and that is Facebook," says one analyst. But OpenSocial members MySpace, Friendster and LinkedIn have 200 million users—almost triple Facebook’s 67 million. "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together," says a Google official. (More Yahoo stories.)