The votes have been tallied and the results are in. OpenSocial Foundation members have selected Jay Parikh of Ning and Joseph Smarr of Plaxo as their community representatives.

Sixty-eight percent of the OpenSocial Foundation membership voted in the election. Parikh and Smarr were selected by members from 13 nominees. Each will serve a one-year term on the OpenSocial Foundation Board.

Thirteen candidates have been nominated to fill two "Community Director" Board seats. Among the nominees are several familiar names including Chris Messina, Krishna Sankar, and Joseph Smarr. (For more information on each of these candidates and the other 10 nominees, visit the OpenSocial Foundation.)

Only members of the OpenSocial Foundation are permitted to vote. If you're not currently a member of the Foundation, you may apply for membership. In order to participate in the election, however, your application for membership must be received by 11:59 PM PDT, October 29. The polls for the election close at 11:59 PM PDT on November 3.

The OpenSocial Foundation was created earlier this year through a partnership among Google, News Corp., and Yahoo! with the express purpose of "creating the structure necessary to facilitate open technical development, developing governance and review procedures for maintaining an open source project, protecting and enforcing IP, trademark, and copyrights."

The OpenSocial Foundation has a great deal of potential to influence "the Web that is to be." And the two Community Directors, once elected, will likely have a significant impact on the future direction of this still formative organization. It will be interesting to see who the members of the Foundation choose to guide this development.

For now, users can only add OpenSocial applications to their profiles, but not to their networks. This will change, however, once future versions of OpenSocial are developed, as Caroline McCarthy reports.

By adding support for OpenSocial, Ning is joining a growing number of social networks that support this standard, including MySpace, hi5, Orkut, and Bebo. For developers, supporting OpenSocial makes good sense, as they can reach a far larger audience with an OpenSocial application than if they just programmed for a given network's own APIs. The only hold-out with regards to supporting OpenSocial is Facebook, though Facebook is also considering the option of opening up its development platform to other social networks in the future.

Ning itself is growing nicely and just celebrated the creation of its 500,000th network. By supporting OpenSocial, Ning now gains the ability to offer its customers an even larger array of options, though it would have been nice if Ning already supported OpenSocial apps on network pages and not just on profiles.

But there are other concerns. In the press call, which you can listen to on ReadWriteTalk, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick asked whether the foundation will splinter OpenSocial and Microsoft?

Another concern is that the foundation only complicates OpenSocial. But what is the alternative? As commenter Clay Newton noted:

"...the landscape continues to get more and more complicated. That said, the alternative is to deal with a bunch of closed vendor platforms, which is not any less complicated."

For that observation and for participating in the conversation, Clay you've won a $30 Amazon voucher - courtesy of our competition sponsors AdaptiveBlue and their Netflix Queue Widget.

What other concerns do you have about OpenSocial Foundation?

However, in the 7 weeks since that announcement, OpenSocial widgets still haven't been deployed on MySpace, and to many, OpenSocial still feels like alpha software. Read/WriteTalk's Sean Ammirati pressed Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks on that point during an interview about OpenSocial last week, but Google is reluctant to put a date on MySpace's adoption of their platform.

"I can’t make a commitment on their behalf but they’re very keen on working with us and pushing ahead," was all Marks would give us.

MySpace is continuing to work on their developer platform, announced in October, though they say it will be compatible with OpenSocial. Will that be the extent of their partnership? Or will OpenSocial be fully deployed on MySpace as it is on Google's own social network, Orkut?

With Facebook opening up their platform to third party social networks, and already luring OpenSocial launch partner bebo, MySpace's participation seems particularly important to the success of Google's endeavor.

The appeal of Facebook's platform -- which is already complete (as much as software ever is) and tested in the wild and comes with more than 6,000 ready-made apps -- is a threat to OpenSocial, even though publicly they deny any brewing competition ("The goal of this is to provide infrastructure," said Kevin Marks in our interview, saying that Google would welcome Facebook as an OpenSocial participant).

For their part, Facebook has also said they are open to one day joining OpenSocial or making the two platforms compatible -- a move that I don't think will happen, but would certainly be a great thing for users. As we wrote in November, however, Facebook really needn't fear OpenSocial the way perhaps Google should fear Facebook's platform.

So, the big question this week will be: will Facebook bow to Google and join its OpenSocial club? The reality is that, for now, developers will create widgets for both Facebook and OpenSocial. Both have very large user bases. But long-term, Facebook risks its user base slowly leaking away and (re)turning to MySpace - or perhaps even niche social networks in the OpenSocial alliance - as more and more cool widgets get released on those other platforms.

Today I've read a couple of compelling posts arguing against OpenSocial (see Jack Schofield's post in the Guardian) and for Facebook (see Mark Cuban's post). And as our own Marshall Kirkpatrick and Josh Catone wrote, OpenSocial isn't that open and so perhaps Facebook doesn't have that much to be scared of.

What do you think: will Facebook join OpenSocial? Or will they snub Google and do their own thing? We're keen to know your opinion! Have your say in the poll below, and in the comments.

"OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning," said Joe Kraus, Director of Product Management, Google in a press release. "The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open."

Google hopes that the formation of the foundation with some of its chief rivals will allay the fears that some expressed when it announced open social. We voiced concern in November over whether Google was exercising leadership or control. "Still remaining is the question of Google's control over the standards creation process. It's not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick. "You know they bullied everyone else involved into accepting their terms of openness, at least a little and probably a lot."

Clearly, Google is hoping to distance itself from those concerns with the creation of an open, non-profit organization to assume control over the OpenSocial project. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially in light of the possibility of a Yahoo! takeover by archrival Microsoft.

Yes 45%
No 46%
Open What? 9%

From the comments on our original post, the 'Yes' camp thinks the benefits include Facebook getting more widgets and developers. Other comments: Timothée said that "Web 2.0 needs normalisation". MikeB asked: "how long can it [Facebook] continue to be a walled garden?". Kiran thinks that "it would be a mistake in long run if they [FB] don't conform to the standards."

In the 'No' camp, Dennis Howlett pointed out that it's a moot point "until identity management and interoperability are clarified [...]". Jon Burg said "there's no reason for Facebook to open the exit doors." Sean Tierney commented that Facebook will "join when it's in their best interest to do so and right now it doesn't make sense." Donv69 said that "Facebook is still too young to start making such moves. Google could easily cripple them using OpenSocial."

So, some excellent pros and cons mentioned in the comments. Also see Marshall Kirkpatrick's analysis of OpenSocial and Josh Catone's thoughts on why Facebook doesn't need OpenSocial.

But let's see if we can break the deadlock. We've all had over a week now to analyze OpenSocial and see how Facebook responded to the pressure (it unveiled a new ad network). So tell us what you think in the poll below:

The killer app for any social network is its users, not its developer API. No one joins a social network so they can rate movies, or turn their friends into zombies, or declare allegiance to their favorite sports club. The reason most people join social networks is because their friends are already there, all that other stuff just enhances their experience once they're in. Users are what make social networks go.

Things like open APIs and data portability and cross network compatibility excite pundits and developers, but most users care for only two things: a good experience (apps can certainly help here) and to be where their friends are. OpenSocial is a huge win for developers, who can now create applications or widgets for just two platforms (OpenSocial and Facebook) and have them deployed to most of the largest social networks. That means a lot less work to reach a maximum amount of people. But it's silly to think that app developers are going to shun Facebook's 50 million users if they don't join OpenSocial. It's equally silly to think that any significant portion of those 50 million users are suddenly going to defect from Facebook because popular social apps will likely be available on other networks.

The winners of OpenSocial are Google (who now has hooks into a large number of social networking sites that reach hundreds of millions of people -- whom Google surely hopes will one day be viewing Google ads), users (who now have access to social apps on networks that previously didn't have developer APIs), app developers. If there are any losers -- and I'm not sure there are -- Facebook is definitely not one.

All that said, joining OpenSocial wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea for Facebook. It might make developers happy. It might make users who maintain more than one social networking profile happy. It could potentially expose their users to new applications, and it would ensure that no killer app that everyone needs is developed for OpenSocial but not for Facebook.

Of everything that was written this weekend on OpenSocial, I'd urge you to check out Don Dodge's excellent post, which I think was one of the most clear headed analyses of the news. But what do you think? Is OpenSocial a threat to Facebook? Should Facebook join with Google or does it not matter? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

What's interesting about these numbers is that the single largest number of registered users isn't coming from MySpace, hi5 or even Orkut. The largest user base appears to be from 51.com, which as we've reported before is one of China's largest social networks with 130M registered users.

Here are the other stats that Google mentioned:

• 315M+ app installs
• 85M+ daily canvas page views
• 7,500+ applications
• 20+ live containers

2,100 of the 7,500 apps are attributed to hi5.

As we noted in our previous post, for the first year OpenSocial has seen tremendous uptake in the online community. The list of organizations developing apps includes AOL, Bebo, hi5, Google, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Yahoo!. Of course still missing from OpenSocial are Facebook and Microsoft.

Perhaps with MySpace covering the key U.S. base and the Chinese social networks coming on board OpenSocial, Facebook will find itself on the outer. Google looks to be well on its way to defining the "new open stack" and populating it with large social networks - so we have to wonder how long Facebook can hold out, even despite its recent moves to expand Facebook Connect. Check out the full OpenSocial slides here.

Instead, he says, OpenSocial's goal is to standardize widget development. According to Canter, many of the social networks that have signed on to OpenSocial never intended to open their network and allows users to transport data, regardless of whether that was part of Google's plans. Rather, networks wanted access to Google's OpenSocial gadgets (their word for widgets) in an attempt to strike back against Facebook's successful platform.

This is something Marshall Kirkpatrick picked up on shortly after Google announced OpenSocial. "As some people have told me tonight, it may have been more accurate to call this 'OpenWidget' - though the press wouldn't have been as good. We've been waiting for data and identity portability - is this all we get?" he wondered in November.

And if Google is really just trying to standardize widget development, are they the ones we want at the helm? Snipperoo's Ivan Pope argues that "we'd be better off working from the ground up rather than getting suckered by a Google et al inspired bit of marketing flammery." I'm inclined to agree. Other than the seeming lack of data portability as part of the OpenSocial initiative, one of the other chief concerns that our own Marshall Kirkpatrick talked about was whether Google was exercising leadership or control.

"Still remaining is the question of Google's control over the standards creation process. It's not possible that one of the largest companies in the US and the largest in this consortium would act entirely out of concern for the world at large," he wrote.

So if OpenSocial is really not about data portability and interoperability between networks (except as far as widget creation is concerned), we'll have to look elsewhere for that. But that's not to say that OpenSocial is a total wash -- widget standardization isn't such a bad idea. As we wrote in November, there are plenty of winners when OpenSocial is adopted. "The winners of OpenSocial are Google (who now has hooks into a large number of social networking sites that reach hundreds of millions of people -- whom Google surely hopes will one day be viewing Google ads), users (who now have access to social apps on networks that previously didn't have developer APIs), app developers," we said.

The question is, do we want Google to be leading the way in widget standardization? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

• The greatest overlap between OpenSocial container sites exists between Myspace and Hi5, in which 43% of Hi5 users also use Myspace.
• Facebook users are 63% female and 36% male whereas the sites integrated with the OpenSocial platform are 61% female and 38% male.
• 52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform.
• Facebook users tend to use 2.9 major social networking sites on average whereas users of OpenSocial container sites tend to use 2.7 major social networking sites.

Myspace Users
- 11.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 63% female, 36% male
- 20% <18 yrs, 40% 18-25 yrs, 27% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
- 2.4 major social networking sites used on average
- 15% are on Facebook, 2% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 6% are on Plaxo, 17% are on Hi5

LinkedIn Users
- 0.8 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 38% female, 61% male
- 2% <18 yrs, 9% 18-25 yrs, 49% 26-35 yrs, 24% 36-45 yrs, 16% >45 yrs
- 3.2 major social networking sites used on average
- 16% are on Facebook, 25% are on Myspace, 12% are on Friendster, 16% are on Plaxo, 8% are on Hi5

Friendster Users
- 2.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 58% female, 41% male
- 12% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 36% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 5% >45 yrs
- 3.0 major social networking sites used on average
- 10% are on Facebook, 44% are on Myspace, 5% are on LinkedIn, 5% are on Plaxo, 26% are on Hi5

Plaxo Users
- 1.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 62% female, 37% male
- 16% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 24% 26-35 yrs, 10% 36-45 yrs, 11% >45 yrs
- 3.6 major social networking sites used on average
- 20% are on Facebook, 53% are on Myspace, 11% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 15% are on Hi5

Hi5 Users
- 4.5 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 60% female, 39% male
- 21% <18 yrs, 44% 18-25 yrs, 23% 26-35 yrs, 6% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
- 2.8 major social networking sites used on average
- 13% are on Facebook, 43% are on Myspace, 2% are on LinkedIn, 13% are on Friendster, 2% are on Plaxo

According to TechCrunch, Michael Arrington has heard from several sources that Google has made plans to launch a competitor to the Data Availability and Facebook Connect platforms on Monday.What we know so far is that the "Friend Connect" platform will be another set of APIs for developers to use in order to securely push profile information into third party websites.

Possible Restrictions

Don't get your hopes up just yet. The most interesting part of this story is that it seems Google will be keeping a tighter reign on its data compared to the Facebook Connect and Data Availability platforms. Where Myspace and Facebook will be using their APIs to distribute data, Google will be requiring third parties to show data directly from Google's servers in an iframe. While third parties will be able to make the connection, it will unfortunately have to be on Google's terms.

Is Google Taking OpenSocial In The Wrong Direction?

Wait a minute. If the rumors are true, isn't this the opposite of what the OpenSocial network stands for? All of these companies are vying to get their product out the door first, while maintaining as much control as possible. Yet, this is a particularly unorthodox move from Google for the OpenSocial network. Thinking on what users and developers are hoping Google will accomplish with the OpenSocial network, Google should be leading the pack with settings, features, and restrictions for the Friend Connect platform. Instead, it seems they'll be doing the exact opposite.

Competing with the platforms of Myspace and Facebook will be no easy feat, even for a giant like Google. While the Friend Connect platform would be a welcomed addition to OpenSocial, developers and users will suffer if Google plans to implement limiting restrictions. If the rumors are true, Google may have already lost this battle.

"The broad thing is much more potential users. There’s a much larger user base across many more social network platforms and in many different countries and social groups that aren’t just the demographic that Facebook already has. One of the reasons that Facebook got a lot of attention is that it has moved into the university educated people working for U.S. corporations’ demographic very strongly which makes sense given its roots. So those of us who work in the industry are suddenly aware of it, but there have been social networks out there for 10 years or more who have been gathering users and clustering in different places, and this is just the one that surfaced within our homophylic demographic so there’s a wider world out there with just Facebook, and that’s the key thing to think about when doing this."

Of course, one of the biggest issues around OpenSocial is just how ready the set of APIs is for public consumption. We pressed Marks on this point, but he was vague and wouldn't commit to classifying the project as alpha-level, beta, or anything else. He would only say that there are already public containers up on Orkut, hi5, Ning and Plaxo that developers can interact with, and that another release of OpenSocial is coming in the next few weeks.

We invite you to decide the status of the OpenSocial project in our poll below, and also to listen to the entire podcast (transcript included) that includes a fascinating discussion of the activity streams API, which we think has been talked about less than the rest of OpenSocial's components.

We're seeing more and more products that utilize the social graph, and so Marks' explanation is a useful primer on the concepts behind them.

Video from LIFT

Related: ReadWriteTalk interview with Kevin Marks, Dec 07; and Alex Iskold's analysis of Why Open Social Really Matters.