MySpace, the world's largest social network, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and Google, on Thursday announced that they are joining forces to launch OpenSocial— a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web.

The partnership spearheads an initiative to standardize and simplify the development of social applications. MySpace said that its announcement underscores MySpace's commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation in an increasingly social Web. Rival social networking site Bebo, has also signed up to the Google standard.

Following being snubbed last week by leading buzzmaking social networking service Facebook in favour of Microsoft, Google announce an alliance to introduce a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.

Earlier this year, Facebook, stole a march on rivals when it opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs are used in the connections among Facebook friends and have proliferated through those connections, as well as through a “news feed” that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing.

"Our partnership with Google allows developers to gain massive distribution without unnecessary specialized development for every platform," said Chris DeWolfe, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of MySpace. "This is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network. We're pleased to collaborate with Google to establish a landmark standard for social applications."

As a founding member of OpenSocial, MySpace will provide critical user mass and platform guidance. The OpenSocial standards are designed to evolve through contribution from the open source community and as new features are developed by various partners. Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

"As the most trafficked website in the country and the most popular social network in the world, MySpace is one of the leading forces in the global social Web," said Dr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the Executive Committee and Chief Executive Officer of Google. "We're thrilled to grow our strategic relationship with MySpace by joining forces on this important initiative."

"As an application developer, we're excited to see MySpace adopting the OpenSocial standard for social application development," said Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixster. "Application developers have been working with MySpace for a long time—this takes what we can do together to a whole new level. The sheer scale of MySpace makes this extremely exciting for us."

"We're all citizens of a larger Web—no network is an island onto itself," said Aber Whitcomb, CTO of MySpace. "We look forward to continuing to develop great technology with Google and all of the OpenSocial participants. It's exciting that social networks are getting social with each other."

The launch of OpenSocial is the first release of technical details for the forthcoming MySpace Platform. From Thursday tonight, developers could begin writing applications for OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial which the MySpace Platform will support at launch.