The only significance I see in this announcement is that Yahoo are kowtow’ing to google gadget standard. This is not necessarily a good thing esp when you consider the significant expertise and rile Yahoo already had in the evolution of widgets to date.

Meanwhile, the “OpenSocial Foundation” website http://www.opensocial.org/ is just a fountain of information – yawn.

Why is OpenSocial important to Social Networking and to the interweb?

Whether they’ll “do what Bebo did” – from a user perspective the new myriad of apps have slowed the site to a crawl – so much so that Bebo have to turn off features at certain times – and rendered many pages illegible amid the multiple slideshows, calendars, sharing luvs, baking muffins, barking babies and so on. What was once a nice wee page to express your individuality (in a completely conforming way) is now akin to trying to say a personal hello to Times Square.

Doubtless there are benefits to programmers and advertisers in there somewhere, but I don’t see how. Not yet. Fully prepared to keep an open mind though.