Google and Co team up to shoot down Facebook

John Battelle of Battellemedia has posted what seems to be a pre press-release by Google (dated 1st November 2007), announcing the launch of a new platform called Open social which aims at creating "a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web -- for developers of social applications and websites that want to add social features."

In a separate post, the blogosphere Mecca, Techcrunch initially put the launch date on November 5th with a killer concept that will effectively ruin Facebook's life (and incidentally wipe out the smile on Mark Zuckerberg's face) - allow approved third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.

However yesterday, Techcrunch confirmed that the Open Social Platform (which lived inside Google with the name maka-maka) will be launch on the 1st of November.

Only three APIs are available at launch and Google will also provide with a live developer testing ground (or sandbox on Google's own ) but in the long term, Google wants Open Social to become a closed solution, something that a blogger calls, one ring to bind them (social networks et al) all.

It is unknown whether big guns like Myspace, Microsoft, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo and tier-2 social networks like Bebo or Skyrock, are going to join the group although business software firms like Salesforce.com and Oracle have joined in according to the NY Times.