It was good to read the press release that Yahoo joined OpenSocial, and that along with Google and MySpace they’ve formed the OpenSocial Foundation. This move should greatly decrease the back-chatter between potentially competing social networking interfaces.

While it’s still a nascent set of standards, OpenSocial has the promise of being a solid foundation upon which interesting applications can be built. It’s this type of common infrastructure that (a) helps bridge between systems, and (b) will firm up a common dialog among developers, too. As more programmers begin to work with the growing toolkit, the dialog can shift from “which platform should we use” to “what can we do with it”.

I look forward to seeing more rapid integration between the big boys, as well as the little guys getting into the game. I’ve seen some amazing stuff peculating in various companies on my latest trip to L.A. and San Francisco, and they’re all noodling around some great ideas that could benefit from a mobile consumer.

Back here at the ranch, there’s nothing I like more than hearing one of the guys calling me over to see some crazy thing he’s whacked together that hooks into our matchmine platform. As specifications like those being developed by OpenSocial take hold, I anticipate seeing more of these kinds of show-and-tell opportunities.

Not all of the ideas turn into much more than kewl hacks, but when you start on solid footing the likelihood of one catching on increases. As someone said to me recently, if you try something new you have a non-zero chance for success and if you try nothing your chances are zero. I see the non-zero success rate increasing further when using tools like OpenSocial is cooking up.