With the recent addition of Yahoo, the new lineup of the OpenSocial Initiative is now comprised of the three biggest names in Internet commerce -- or what CNET calls "the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.'s MySpace.com". "The OpenSocial Foundation is expected to be formed within 90 days, with more OpenSocial partners from across the Web on board in addition to the three responsible for the announcement," stated the CNET article from earlier today. So, just what is this new organization? According to Google's official page, "OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds."A common API means you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.OpenSocial is built upon gadgets, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, you can build a complete social app with no server at all. Of course, you can also host your application on your own servers if you prefer. In all cases, Google's gadget caching technology can ease your bandwidth demands should your app suddenly become a worldwide success.The CNET article adds a bit more detail: The specific purpose of the new nonprofit, according to a release, is "to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the Web." It's a particularly crucial move for Google, which has been eager to emphasize that OpenSocial is a community standard, not a Mountain View project."OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said in a joint statement from the three companies. "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."Indeed, the OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent entity with its own intellectual property and governance policies. Related assets are expected to be in place by the beginning of July.Google first announced OpenSocial in October as a response to the plethora of announcements on behalf of social-networking sites that they would follow in Facebook's footsteps and create developer platforms of their own. With so many disparate developer strategies, the social-media landscape could grow even more fragmented, and Google launched the OpenSocial API (and later the Social Graph API) as a means to provide some connectivity. Major players like MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, and Plaxo, along with a host of smaller social networks and many that are unknown in the U.S., all opted to participate in the new initiative.Although the project was announced last year, it's now picked up a huge amount of steam (helped in no small part by Yahoo's entry into the collective) and is expected to go live within the next 90 days. "Some OpenSocial platforms, like foundation partner MySpace's, are already live," reports the CNET article. "Others are still in testing phases or have yet to make any kind of debut."Interestingly, Facebook, the site that first kicked off the recent social-networking craze, is sitting this one out. "As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation," a statement from the company read. "The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience."