Its not even 2 weeks since the announcement of the Microsoft-Facebook 240 million deal that the search giant Google has reacted in a manner which only acknowleges facebook as a huge threat!

 First thing is first Google has opened the Orkut API to developers and announced this development on the official orkut blog yesterday.  This means now like facebook developers would be able to build applications for orkut as well. Currently this is retricted where developers need to signup to get access to the API. The anatomy of the orkut API is available here.

Orkut also added answers feature besides opening its API. This feature is exactly like yahoo answers only in this case one can ask ones friends the any question. While asking questions the Orkut users can either direct their question to specific friends or allow the system to automatically route the question to friends who have answered similar questions before. This feature will surely give orkut users more to do than just scrap others on orkut. Also with the API now i expect more such interactive social applications (and maybe some local flavoured indian applications) surfacing on orkut.

In another major development Google has announced OpenSocial a platform that plans to integrate the various social networking sites by providing a set of common APIs that make it easy to create and host social applications on the web. OpenSocial allows developers to write an application once that will run anywhere i.e. on any social network that supports the OpenSocial APIs. Currently members of the OpenSocial community include MySpace, Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. This is an open declaration of WAR by Google against facebook and inturn Microsoft! This is googles attempt to rival facebooks platform status and create the largest developer community the web has seen till date!

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