News Corp's (NWS) MySpace Joins Google (GOOG) Social Network Group

TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider have reported that News Corp’s (NWS) MySpace will join the new Google (GOOG) OpenSocial initiative. The Google program pulls together a number of social networks include the search company’s own property Orkut.

As TechCrunch writes Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks.

The additional of MySpace, the largest social network property is a blow to rival Facebook in which Microsoft (MSFT) recently made an investment. Google’s software will allow developers to write applications which will now run on over a dozen of the larger networks, a scale that Facebook can never hope to match. "OpenSocial is going to become the de facto standard (for developers) instantly out of the gates. It is going to have a reach of 200 million users, which is way bigger than anything else out there," Chris DeWolfe, chief executive and co-founder of MySpace told Reuters.

Douglas A. McIntyre