Marketing Pilgrim

It seems like an innocuous enough idea at first: Yahoo’s making moves as if to join the OpenSocial initiative of standardized APIs for social network developer/3rd party apps. And then we think about it: OpenSocial is Google’s baby.

Yahoo’s current official comment, of course, isn’t very informative:

Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole. While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.

The New York Times, however, says otherwise. An article yesterday states that “Yahoo intends to join OpenSocial.” Interestingly, the Times says that this isn’t an act of defeat for Yahoo, as most of us would assume when Yahoo signs on to a Google effort five months later.

Instead, Yahoo’s participation would be a boost for OpenSocial by adding the largest user base to date. That’s right, more than MySpace’s 100+ million—Yahoo’s Wikipedia article (citing Alexa stats; and how’s that for reliable data?) says they have 130 million unique users each month.

Maybe today’s the day to buy a lottery ticket if Yahoo following in Google’s footsteps is a good sign for Google’s project .

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