With Google getting involved in almost every kind of new media these days, it should be no surprise that they now have their eyes on the social networking phenomenon.

Yet, like with most everything they do, they plan to put their own unique stamp on what’s become a very widespread and increasingly social acceptable form of communication. From this week’s New York Times:

Google’s vision — “Social Will Be Everywhere” — is more compelling than anything Facebook could possibly devise. Who wouldn’t prefer the unlimited freedom to take one’s own trusted circle anywhere on the Web … ?

At that point, Facebook and other social networking sites appeared to be the only companies in a position to instill fear in Google. The sites tend to be the place where many members head first when they go online, and many end up staying right there. The sites also hamper Google’s ability to meet its grand charter of organizing the world’s information and making it available to all; the Google search crawler is not allowed to land on most social networking islands and gather data about what island residents are saying and doing.

… In a bravura switch of strategy, Google left its own island to embrace open standards that belong to no one company. Its initiative, which it calls OpenSocial, is an appeal to software developers and Web sites to cooperate in adopting a single set of software standards for the little software widgets that can add a social-networking layer to all Web sites. Agreement on a standard would save users from the aggravation of joining multiple networks and save developers from the aggravation of writing code that works only with specific sites. Unlike Facebook’s programming requirements, Google’s use nonproprietary programming languages.

The decision by MySpace, the No. 1 social networking site in the world, with more than 100 million unique visitors in September, to join OpenSocial gives Google an impressive assembly of social networking partners.

Read the full article here.