(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-03-26 11:18

Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday it was joining the Google-led OpenSocial alliance, which is creating software work fluidly across different social networks.

News Corp's MySpace earlier pledged support, and the three companies announced Tuesday that they were forming the OpenSocial Foundation to maintain a neutral, community-governed forum for developing applications. It will be set up as a nonprofit entity, with assets to be assigned to the new organization by July 1.

The idea behind the Google-initiated OpenSocial platform is to create a common coding standard for the applications so they work on hundreds of Web sites. The applications could permit chats, games, media sharing and more.

"Common specifications are beneficial to the developer community at large" and eventually enrich the Web experience for people, Wade Chambers, Yahoo's vice president of platforms, said on a conference call.

The addition of Yahoo could put pressure on Facebook, the No. 2 social-networking site behind MySpace, to pledge support as well, though Facebook has had tremendous success encouraging developers to write tools specifically for it.

Facebook has remained aloof from OpenSocial. Last year, Facebook received 240 million dollars in backing from Microsoft Corp. Neither Facebook nor Microsoft has signed up to support OpenSocial.