Google’s newly announced open social networking platform OpenSocial is a set of API's that allows developers to create applications that work on any social network that joins Google’s open partnership – newly announced members include Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace, hi5, XING, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning, Salesforce.com and Oracle.

This strategy follows Facebook’s rapid growth based on opening its “social graph” to developers and Microsoft’s $240 million investment for 1.6 percent of the company. However, unlike Google, Facebook doesn’t open its API’s to support other social networks.

For Google, the economics of facilitating open source API’s is simple - more applications, means more users, which means more searches, leading to more ad revenue. Facebook may have the early lead, but OpenSocial applications will be easier to develop than Facebook applications (HTML vs FBML) and will also work across a range of social networks. Google’s strategy will be to integrate its AdSense and DoubleClick advertising services based on utilising the OpenSocial API's that work across all the partner social networks. This will challenge the advertising strategy of Facebook, which is developing a behaviorial targeted ad service. OpenSocial could create an identity layer for the Internet–with user profile data, relationships, social graph, community, group and brands easily transferable between “play” and “work” social networks.

B2B publishers should be concerned that their print communities don’t become social networks for the OpenSocial partnership to target as they migrate online – otherwise what is their future? B2B publishers can fight back with an integrated platform of print, events and online with vertical search as a key integrated component to boost their online advertising revenue.