http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/techtracks/2008/03/microsoft_yahoo_make_social_network_plays.html

http://sites.google.com/a/opensocial.org/opensocial/Home

This article shows how important online social networks have become. Some of the largest software/tech companies found it necessary to join together in an effort to minimize the differences between using most of the more popular social networking websites. Yahoo joined in the OpenSocial campaign, created by Google. OpenSocial “defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites,” in an effort to have similar structure and applications that work across websites, thus allowing its users greater ease of use and portability. The hope is that a user will be able to use an application designed to interact with one website and will still be able to use that application with another without having to re-do everything all over again.

What seems to be happening here is that a group of social networks will have common applications between them, that will allow their users to have a single application that does the same task for both websites. In effect, it is an information network joining social networks (which are websites, and thus part of an information network). Thus, we see a blurring of the lines between social and information networks, which allow these websites to act as both at the same time, affording its users the benefits of both worlds. Users are able to interact socially with each other, and because of the websites they can interact in new ways, such as browsing for friends based on similar interests, in the more “train-of-thought” pattern found in information networks.

Also, because there is not one giant all-encompassing social network available on the internet, the advent of OpenSocial means that users will have the ability to use the same applications across multiple social networks without the need to redo things multiple times, thus bringing the websites together more tightly. This will hopefully allow users the choice of multiple social networking websites so that they can use the same website their friends use, without reduced functionality or multiple copies of the same thing.