Open Social Networks Platform

Google just announced that MySpace and Six Apart will join its OpenSocial initiative together with Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

OpenSocial is an open interchange that allows users to take their social graph with them from site to site, basically unifying all the social networks supporting the initiative into one big virtual social networks.

This changes the rules for Facebook because now users have a choice of picking dozens (soon to be hundreds?) of open sites rather than choosing Facebook’s closed platform.

Google basically just redefined the rules of the game in social networking.

Will Facebook be forced to “open up” and support OpenSocial? And if so, as such a move will push its Facebook Apps platform aside, what will be its comparative advantage over the other networks out there?