OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google, and released November 1, 2007 (version 0.6). Based on HTML and JavaScript, as well as the Google Gadgets framework, OpenSocial includes four APIs for social software applications to access data and core functions on participating social networks :

• General JavaScript API
• People and Friends : people and relationship information
• Activities : publishing and accessing user activity information
• Persistence (simple key-value pair data for server-free stateful applications

OpenSocial is currently in alpha development, version 0.8 was released on May 28, 2008. Applications implementing the OpenSocial APIs will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them. OpenSocial is rumored to be part of a larger social networking initiative by Google code-named “Maka-Maka”. An Apache incubator open source project, Shindig, was launched in December, 2007, to provide a reference implementation of the OpenSocial standards.