This morning I wrote about the new OpenSocial foundation. Unfortunately I missed out on the press call but there were definitely some key takeaways. Marshall Kirkpatrick provides a great writeup of the call. Two significant statements made was that Orkut will go live next week and that 200 million users will be reached by all the applications.

Who wasn’t present on the phone call? Facebook and Microsoft. These are the two remaining companies that have not joined OpenSocial. They are still holding out an ultimately are trying to battle the underdog who has gained significant momentum: OpenSocial. It’s hard to call any standard promoted by Google an “underdog” but technically there are less application install on their platform but more potential users.

So this leads me to question where all of this is going. One conclusion that I have is that these standards are much larger than the initial group of developers that were successful on Facebook. While we still see some of the leaders making a presence on MySpace, there a number of new players but strangely enough most of them are still the traditional players on the social web.

Conversely, much of what we are seeing is a battle taking place, much of which is being done through press releases and some of which is being done by developers. The social web is also getting a whole lot more complex. As Scot Kveton from the OpenID foundation said, “I think this is great – they are doing all o fthe right things with the non-assertion covenant but its another foundation. Its more work for companies to join, etc. So now you have openid, opensocial, oauth is going to have to do something, microformats, etc – this gets pretty complicated IMHO.”

Ultimately what we would like is for things to become a lot more simple but in the short-run it appears as though things will have to get a lot more complex before it gets easy. This is great for those helping companies navigate the social web though. There will be a lot more business headed towards consultants in this space over the coming months.

Caroline McCarthy has posted the details of a new foundation that has been set up to “support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year as a way to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites.” The purpose of the new organization is to spread the concept that OpenSocial is not being managed by Google but is instead being supported by the community.

My biggest problem with the standard so far has been that it’s not easy! There are multiple standards that must be supported to launch your application on MySpace and other social networks so far. It appears that this new foundation will focus on bringing together the community to help further the OpenSocial standard. A statement from Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, said “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

The new foundation has the support of both Yahoo, Google and MySpace. This comes on the heels of the data portability news from Microsoft earlier this morning. Looks like the Google P.R. engine is in full swing. While I’m not sure about the significance of this news as it pertains to the future of the social web, this new foundation is paving the way for OpenSocial to become the social web standard as opposed to the licensing of the Facebook platform to other websites.

Yesterday, Google announced that OpenSocial has been delayed yet again. Rather than launching the Orkut platform immediately, they have decided to enter a testing phase during which time they will begin whitelisting applications to be placed in the Orkut directory. After the pre-launch which will be a four week period, OpenSocial and the Orkut platform will finally go live.

For those that were expecting Orkut to go live next week, you will be disappointed. There is no word on whether or not this will also delay the launch of the MySpace platform which is also supposed to launch next week. The launch of Orkut and MySpace will launch the beginning of the platform wars during which time we will see if Facebook can maintain its dominant position or if the larger MySpace user base will prove to be a tough competitor.

Ultimately, the future of transportable identities will be partially dependent on the success of competing social platforms. If the other social platforms fail to attract massive user installations, we will see a decrease in the hype surrounding social applications. The most likely scenario involves slower yet steady growth on competing platforms due to spam filters already in place at launch time. This is not a bad situation, it just means that the social platforms will take a longer time to see widespread adoption.