We’ve been following OpenSocial since it launched a little over a week ago. A few days later I posted a brief backgrounder and highlighted some of the neat things happening around OpenSocial.

A week later and it’s no surprise that some smart people are stepping up and jumping in head first — not to say that it’s foolish or risky but it’s still very early and even among the launch members adoption is slow. Regardless, momentum is gaining so I’m going to pluck a few of the more interesting and noteworthy developments:

• Yahoo! Mail and iGoogle are well poised to take on Facebook: both Yahoo and Google run massive web mail services, providing them with something it’s taken Facebook months to build: the social graph — the real-life connections between you and your friends (and something very precious to Facebook’s vitality). As Google and Yahoo make moves to roll social networking functionality into their email tools (where you’re already spending an important chunk of your online time) OpenSocial will certainly help them to catch up in the areas where Facebook still has a significant lead: applications.
• Movable Type Community Solution: SixApart has launched a new version of their Movable Type blogging platform called Movable Type Community Solution. It’s an enterprise tool that brings a lot of Web 1.0 technologies like forums, discussion boards and message boards into the Web2.0 age alongside blogging — taking advantage of new technology, search friendly content, and social networking concepts like credibility gained through recommendations from friends and popularity. SixApart was one of the members announced when OpenSocial launched and supports the API through the use of third-party widgets on the platform.
• OpenSocket puts OpenSocial onto Facebook: This is probably the neatest thing I came across all week. Dan Lester and Ignacio Blanco have created a “wrapper” called OpenSocket that allows developers to run OpenSocial widgets within Facebook! The motivation behind it is pretty cool:
  

  The initial goal is to bring OpenSocial widgets to Facebook before they reach MySpace, thus demonstrating the power of technology over business politics.This can be seen as a ‘petition’ to Facebook to open up once they’ve had a chance to evaluate OpenSocial.

  While this is a really nifty idea, when it comes down to it there aren’t a whole lot of OpenSocial widgets in existence and as pointed out on the OpenSocket site there are some technical issues around where widgets are hosted that still needs to be addressed. Best of luck to them though, it’s a really cool project. Hopefully they’ll realize the opportunity in developing the reverse version that would allow the thousands of Facebook applications plug into a wrapper that makes them compatible with OpenSocial. Now that would be huge.