Google OpenSocial
Google recently announced OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for building social applications. This is a great idea and I hope it gains momentum. This will allow developers to learn one API for building social applications for multiple websites.
I blogged a few weeks ago at my frustration to having my contacts and, on the social sites I use, connections spread out across so many different platforms. OpenSocial as a platform has the potential to address that problem with some inventive developer creating a contacts management / repository that can be accessed through the same component on different sites. I would then be able to own my contacts an connections and not every different site I interact with.
I think this kind of platform is necessary for the current social networking movement to take it to the next step. The natural evolution is cross pollination across the successful sites. I want to show my flickr pictures (or a set of them) to the contacts on my LinkedIn or classmates.com page. I want to have my twitter messages broadcast on my MySpace page.
This is what we need to bring more powerful and pervasive social applications. I cannot wait to start hacking myself.