Google has released a developers API to implement open-standards social networks.
Called OpenSocial, the code libraries should allow developers to write applications just once that will run on all social network platforms supporting the API. The current situation is that a developer needs to re-write an application for each social network. There are over 5000 applications for Facebook already – most of them utterly pointless.
The API can be found at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/