Google has announced details of a new service call OpenSocial, which offers a standard for developers looking to write applications and programs that can run on various social networking sites.

Google OpenSocial, launched today, is the firms' first foray into social networking. It offers a set of APIs that users can use to build applications that work on web sites, as well as to create links between participating web services.

Announcing it Jeff Huber, senior vice president of engineering at Google, said "The web is fundamentally better when it is social, and we're only just starting to see what's possible when you bring social information into different contexts on the web."

"There's a lot of innovation that will be spurred simply by creating a standard way for developers to run social applications in more places. With the input and iteration of the community, we hope OpenSocial will become a standard set of technologies for making the web more social."

Google has social networking sites including Orkut, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, Six Apart involved, as well as a couple of enterprise firms including Oracle and Salesforce, but not Facebook. The set of APIs includes tools for managing newsfeeds, profile information, social information and activities. Tools that relate to individual users, but could also be leveraged by businesses looking to get an over view of their employees' strengths and areas of expertise.

Speaking to IT Week recently, Matt Glotzbach the US Enterprise director at Google, said that he could see the benefits of such a tool, but refused to comment on whether Google had any social networking type releases coming out.

However, he did say that all Google applications were, "enterprise candidates ", and hinted that a tool that enterprises could use to find out whether staff were online, if they were members of any working groups, and what abilities they had, would be very useful.

David Bradshaw of Ovum agreed. He said that such social networking tools should appeal to businesses. "Real time collaboration, sharing, and presence information across a range of applications could be very valuable," he explained.

"A set of collaboration tools that you can take with you from application to application is very useful."

Google's announcement follows a significant investment in Facebook by Microsoft. For just 1.6 per cent of that social networking site Microsoft paid some $240m. Facebook doesn't open up its APIs to third parties social sites, but thousands of applications have been created for, and adopted by, its users.

Writing in his blog GigaOm, Om Malik said that the openness of the Google tools could make it a winner, and draw developers away from Facebook. "Common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications… Several Facebook developers have groused that a special Facebook-only mark-up language makes the task of writing Facebook apps tougher," he said.