What’s funny is many of these developers (in fact, all the examples I just used) run their own app platforms. So everybody’s an app, and everybody’s a platform.

Xobni’s offering has two distinctive aspects: it offers developers access to the millions of corporate Outlook users, and it is built using the open standard OpenSocial APIs so Web app developers will be able to easily extend their products to the desktop.

Xobni said it plans to bring the Gadget Store to its own Web and mobile products, but did not give a date.

Joe Kraus–the longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sold his most recent start-up, JotSpot, to Google in 2006 and has been a director of product management since–has moved to its Google Ventures unit as a partner, said several sources.

Sources added that Kraus (pictured above) is likely to be the first of several well-known appointments at the relatively new venture arm of the search giant.

Google (GOOG) announced its VC play in March and said the fund will invest $100 million in “exceptional” start-ups over the next year.

“We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet,” Managing Partners Rich Miner and Bill Maris explained in a blog post when Google Ventures debuted. “Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.”

Well, that now apparently means Kraus, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded the Web 1.0-era Excite portal and, in Web 2.0, JotSpot, which made wiki-style software for online collaboration.

Currently, only Miner and Maris are listed on the bios page of Google Venture’s online site.

Since the acquisition, Kraus has been leading Google’s OpenSocial efforts to develop standards for social networking platforms.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Luckily, we have a professional willing to interpret the goings-on, free of charge. Meet Kevin Marks, whose business card describes him as “developer advocate” at Google (GOOG).

Marks, who has previously put in time at Apple (AAPL) and Technorati as an engineer, now has a job that seems to involve being an, um, advocate on behalf of his employer, specifically for its OpenSocial program. I think of OpenSocial as the “everyone but Facebook” social-network alliance, and Marks didn’t disabuse of me that notion in our chat on Sunday.

But he did add some layers of nuance, and he was game when I asked him to tell me what the theme of the conference has been so far. In a word: Twitter.

The longer version is here:

This morning the company threw its support behind OpenSocial–a Google-led initiative to foster interoperability between social applications–and with MySpace (NWS) and Google, it announced the OpenSocial Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the mitigation of perceptions that Google will use OpenSocial for its own benefit.

“… Today … we’ve joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard,” Yahoo VP of Platforms Wade Chambers said in a post to Yahoo Anecdotal. “Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages. We feel that this is the right step at this stage in its evolution. It’s no longer a trial balloon–it’s for real. We are taking this opportunity to help ensure Web sites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.”

Queried by the Times, Yahoo offered no further detail on the rumor. “Yahoo has a rich history of supporting open standards, such as OpenID and Apache Hadoop, as we believe industry collaboration is beneficial to the developer community and the Web as a whole,” said a company spokeswoman. “While we are evaluating OpenSocial as an emerging standard, we do not comment on speculation or rumors.”

Anyway, if this particular rumor proves true, it’s potentially big news. As Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li notes, it “would mean that the site with the largest group of users, and with the largest base of registered users, would be joining OpenSocial.”

“[We] want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model,” Facebook senior platform manager Ami Vora said in a blog post announcing the move. “In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins–users get a better experience around the Web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications. “

Among the first sites to avail themselves of the Facebook Platform standards was Bebo, an OpenSocial partner. Isn’t that a bit of a slap in the face for Google? Bebo co-founder and CEO Michael Birch says no. When OpenSocial finally launches, Bebo will support it as well. “OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform are clearly different platforms,” Birch told News.com. “Our lazy development team said they couldn’t do both at once.”

Max Levchin, founder, chairman and CEO of Slide–the No. 1 widget maker on Facebook–sent out an email (posted in full after the jump) on Friday about the development. His point? For makers of third-party applications for social networks, their bread is buttered on all sides and along the edges.

Max, to continue the carb metaphor, is one smart cookie. (See my series of three interviews with him, also after the jump, to get an idea of his plans for world widget domination.)

Here’s the letter:

Friends,

–
Max Levchin
Chairman & CEO
Slide, Inc

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

How perfect! Canter has been a nettlesome presence of late on the Web 2.0 scene, with his longtime effort to pester all these social-networking platforms to interoperate and open their social graphs. His mantra: “Bringing social to software.”

And OpenSocial obviously soothed the savage beast, as you will see in the video interview I did with him below.

The tech specs for the project once called Maka-Maka (we like that name a lot better) allows for the creation of Web-based applications that can be written to work across a lot of different social-networking sites.

At the beginning of a press conference on the initiative last week, the Google PR person asked the press to wait to start until the “gang” was assembled–a group that included Google and MySpace execs–a faux pas that was inadvertent but completely apt.

But Canter doesn’t care if it’s a rumble or not, as long as it moves the needle forward on opening up platforms.

He has self-interest, of course, since such a development would help his company, PeopleAggregator. But for all his well-known bluster, which includes yelling out questions from tables at industry dinners (and where I jokingly once suggested Tasering him), I do think Marc’s often-annoying harangues are sincere and entirely correct for consumers.

Why shouldn’t you easily be able to move your information anywhere you like and at anytime you want?

It’s nice to let Canter speak a bit. In this case–but not always, Marc, so simmer down!–he kind of deserves the stage on this topic.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Kara Visits VC Peter Thiel: A video interview with the first investor in Facebook (pictured here), who also sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion.

Thiel’s take: Web 2.0 is underhyped!

Writers’ Strike!: The battle is on in Hollywood, as writers and studios fight over DVD fees split, but there is also wrangling over potential profits from new media efforts.

While that income is still pretty small, it’s a canard that producers are trying to insist that they can’t fork over better percentages because the market needs room to grow. Writers deserve their fair share as the online business gets bigger over the next decade.

Maka-Maka Melee?: Google took a solid shot at Facebook with its new OpenSocial offering, which lets anyone become a Facebook! The signing of MySpace at the end of the week was another slap, of course.

But this week Facebook fires back with its SocialAds offering to compete in the online ad game, where Google rules.

Hulu Doesn’t Stink: I and many others were surprised how good an experience the new online video joint venture from NBC Universal and News Corp. is so far.

While it is certainly not perfect (no downloading, limits on hit shows), it is a clean, easy-to-use service that gives users a lot of ability to control content and a quantum leap in attitude from Hollywood pooh-bahs.

Maybe they could become that enlightened when it comes to ending the writers’ strike.

Bebo and Six Apart are nice additions, but it’s MySpace that will bring quite a bit more heft to this effort–an addressable market of some 70 million active monthly users, at last report.

Who’ll next join OpenSocial? Will it be Facebook? CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s likely puzzling that question out at this very moment as he waits for an invitation to join–which apparently hasn’t yet been extended. “Despite reports, Facebook has still not been briefed on OpenSocial,” the company said in a statement. “When we have had a chance to understand the technology, Facebook will evaluate participation relative to the benefits to its 50 million users and 100,000 platform developers.”

OpenSocial, as Google has named it, is a set of common APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable developers to write applications for a broad range of Web sites and services without any individual customization. Think of it as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “social graph” but writ large.

And while some might smirk at OpenSocial’s initial roster of participants–LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo and Google’s own “big in Brazil” social network Orkut–it does include a few big names: business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle. Oh, and Google. Which, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, already has much of the critical mass it needs to push this effort forward: “Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. … Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.”

OpenSocial, as Google has named it, is a set of common APIs (application programming interfaces) that will enable developers to write applications for a broad range of Web sites and services without any individual customization. Think of it as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “social graph” but writ large.

And while some might smirk at OpenSocial’s initial roster of participants–LinkedIn, hi5, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo and Google’s own “big in Brazil” social network Orkut–it does include a few big names: business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle. Oh, and Google. Which, as TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld points out, already has much of the critical mass it needs to push this effort forward: “Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. … Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath. The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.”

In the interest of time-saving, we will group them all here in one easy list that you can clip and save.

DEALS AFOOT?:

Yes, there is always a lot of sniffing around out there, especially given that a lot of Web 2.0 companies are more likely to be acquired than go public.

Do look for smaller ad networks to be bought up in the wake of a spate of bigger sales of late–DoubleClick to Google, aQuantive to Microsoft, Right Media and BlueLithium to Yahoo).

Now, it looks like AOL might get into the game again, after presciently grabbing Advertising.com way back in 2004 for $435 million. The new target, in a deal that a source close to the company said is “80% there,” is Quigo–the content-targeting ad network. The price? About $300 million.

Less likely for action are some other names being bandied about.

WordPress (the blogging software and hosting company AllThingsD.com uses), for example, has some suitors and is contemplating a sale after some offers. But don’t bet on it.

And RockYou is not being bought by, say, Yahoo–at least not this week. While rumors of wild valuations for the No. 2 maker of widgets on Facebook (Slide usually outranks it) have been bandied about, it has not had any significant talks with anyone.

GOOGLE GETS FRIENDLY (EXCEPT TO FACEBOOK):

As we wrote in a post yesterday, contrary to rumors, the Google project (codenamed Maka-Maka, doubtlessly by that wacky pair, Graham Spencer and Joe Kraus, pictured here, formerly of JotSpot and Excite, who worked on it) was imminent. As in now. Right now. This instant.

Officially named OpenSocial, it is a way to create a social graph over the Web that is open to third-party apps friendly and, as I wrote, is indeed both a “real attempted assault on the Facebook platform or more of a way to widely spread the gospel of social networking (and, thus, an assault on the Facebook platform).”

While Google has signed a bunch of prominent partners, it has yet to grab the No. 2 social-networking site Facebook (unlikely) and the No. 1 MySpace (much more likely, but don’t hold your breath). But it’s definitely a put-up-or-shut-up dare by the search giant, especially given Facebook’s professed love of openness.

Who knows if it will catch on, given that it is clear it is all in the hands of the apps developer community. If not, it will surely be a big black eye for Google, if it can’t motivate widely beyond search.

FACEBOOK IS A BIG BOY NOW:

It looks like former Yahoo Mike Murphy–who heads ad sales at Facebook (and is pictured here)–is finally getting his ducks in order with a new ad offering to be called SocialAds next week at its big confab in NYC.

Unlike the competition’s contextual ad programs, this will be squarely aimed at people’s self-expressed interests and demographics.

And, of course, Microsoft will be Facebook’s partner in serving the ads, for now at least. Good lord, it has bought and paid for this date many times over, so a fine time must be had by all!

I can’t tell you how thrilled we are that Facebook (and that nice boy Mark Zuckerberg) is finally putting some meat on its skinny little business model to take advantage of its fast-growing popularity.

But let’s keep in mind that it remains to be seen how lucrative this kind of ad network is and how scalable it is across the Web (and not just on Facebook).

It will also be interesting to see if the offering is truly innovative and different than existing solutions–or if it just serves up some dumb and useless ad for blood supplies, because you happen to be playing Vampire a little too much.

(We’re teasing, Mark, but not very much at all.)

OH, YES, THAT GPHONE:

More open verbiage from Google, which will roll out a mobile-phone operating system of software and services for a new kind of open cellphone sometime in this millennium (are you as sick of the speculation about the Gphone as I am?).

Since we’re talked out, here’s a much better Wall Street Journal Online video on the subject:

BOVINE UPDATE

Yahoo’s holy cows? Still sacred and going strong!

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.