AOL Joins OpenSocial

OpenSocial gained a new convert today. AOL is officially joining the initiative to standardize social-networking apps, Google VP of Engineering David Glazer announced today at the Google I/O event. TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson liveblogged the entire session, which just ended. From his notes:

AOL joins OpenSocial today. Their suite of products will support the standard.

Not much more was mentioned. AOL, of course, bought Bebo for $850 million, which is already part of OpenSocial. But Bebo is also integrated with the Facebook platform.

So is AOL just hedging its bets in the social network wars? Looks like it. With Facebook planning to open-source its platform, it will be interesting to see if AOL shows up as a partner for fbOpen as well.

Update: A post on the official OpenSocial Blog states that AOL’s first steps will be to implement Gadgets on myAOL.com. The post says that Gadgets should help developers create widgets that can be used on myAOL, as well as the web at large.