Yahoo! Supports OpenSocial; Yahoo!, MySpace and Google to Form Non-Profit OpenSocial Foundation [International]

Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google today announced they have agreed to form the OpenSocial Foundation to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web. Yahoo!'s support of OpenSocial and role as a founding member of the new foundation are landmarks for the rapidly growing specification which will now offer developers the potential to connect with more than 500 million people worldwide.

The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.

The OpenSocial Foundation website at www.opensocial.org will serve as the portal for the community to find all information about OpenSocial and the foundation as they evolve. Developers and website owners can now visit www.opensocial.org for the latest specifications, links to other resources, and the opportunity to get involved.

Engineers from Yahoo!, MySpace, and Google will continue to work together and with the OpenSocial community to further advance the specification through the new foundation, continuing several core elements of OpenSocial since its announcement by Google, MySpace, and many others in November 2007:
· all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
· public community involvement shapes the specification's direction
· an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/

About OpenSocial
OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a "favorite photos" application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology ro, providing common "plumbing" that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.
The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities ' everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.

Steady Evolution, Important Milestones
Millions of people around the world are beginning to see the benefits of the OpenSocial platform as new features appear on their favorite social networks. MySpace launched the MySpace Developer Platform, which uses the OpenSocial APIs, and began rolling out applications to its users. orkut has also started making OpenSocial applications available to its users, and hi5 will do so at the end of March.

Thanks to the Shindig reference implementation, most websites can have a proof of concept of OpenSocial applications up and running in days. That means websites need only to make this small time investment in order to make thousands of new social features available to their users.

Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, Orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, XING, and others. In time, OpenSocial will unlock more powerful and pervasive social capabilities across the entire web, as developers' applications can easily reach users across any of the websites, web applications, or social networks they use.

Bloggers accuse Yahoo of plagiarism [India]

The Indian blogging community comes together to fight alleged copyright violation by Internet companies, observes March 5 as ''Remove Plagiarism'' day

BANGALORE: More than one hundred Indian blogs have joined hands to protest alleged instances of plagiarism by Yahoo India.

Surya Gayathri, a blogger, alleged that the beta version of Yahoo Malayalam had lifted six recipes from her blog without her knowledge.
Her page displayed screen shots of Yahoo Malayalam, the content of which she alleged was lifted from her page.

The plagiarized content was later removed after bloggers contacted Yahoo.
Irked by Yahoo’s attitude, the blogging community came out in full support of Gayathri and observed March 5 as the “Remove Plagiarism” day. Bloggers demanded an apology from Yahoo.

“It is a little amusing, amazing and agonizing to see how the corporate world looks at the blogs and bloggers as silly little creatures, which they can play with, manipulate and crush at their will,” a blog called Copyright Violations said.

Many bloggers expressed shock at the incident. “Recently Yahoo! India launched a Malayalam Language Portal (along with other Indian languages), but they copied content from many Malayalam bloggers, which were protected under Creative Common Licensing. None of the bloggers were contacted and it was a rude shock to us that giants like Yahoo! would do this,” Santhosh Pillai, a blogger wrote.

Some blogs displayed comments in support of Gayathri, and even came up with anti-Yahoo icons and cartoons.

“Why is this is dear to me? Just because we write and take pictures due to our passion for food and writing and give the content for free for others to cook and create, that doesn’t mean someone can take us for a ride and copy our content, especially a giant corporation like Yahoo!” said a blogger who writes under the nickname Inji Pennu.
“The content in this page was provided by WebDunia,” the Yahoo Malayalam page said.
Another blogger wrote: “We all make mistakes, we apologize later. Don’t we all? To live in a society we have to follow such norms. We bloggers complained to Yahoo! and Yahoo! India. How did they respond? They simply refused to apologize. Yahoo! India office even had the audacity to claim copying contents is not copyright violation. The subcontractor (WebDunia) for Yahoo! India claims all was done on ‘good faith’. Contents were removed from Yahoo’s domain silently. If this was done on good faith and there was no copyright violation? Isn’t this a shame? Imagine if it was between two corporations instead of corporate vs blog? It would have been any lawyers’ dream.”
Yahoo could not be contacted on Tuesday despite repeated attempts.

Many bloggers had earlier alleged of other prominent India Web sites taking content from their pages without permission.

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