Joe has been working on something I like a lot, the OpenSocial Foundation (opensocial.org). It was announced this morning (there’s a press call starting in about an hour). It’ll be jointly founded by Yahoo MySpace and Google. The current estimate for bootstrapping the entity is July.

Here’s a quote from him the release:
"The formation of this foundation will ensure that [OpenSocial] remains [a community-driven specification] in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open."

The three key points are as follows:

• all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
• public community involvement shapes the specification direction
• an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig

The jury’s still out, but OpenSocial could become an important creative enabler as a significant distribution network for social apps. If that’s the case, having the spec under the management of an independent entity is not a bad idea.