Ning, a popular web service that lets you set up your own Facebook-style social network (and hosts it for you) just added something that Facebook and MySpace have had for quite a while now: apps. Like applications on those other, bigger, networks, Ning Apps are powered by OpenSocial, a much-hyped API for building third-party apps that work on multiple social networks. Open Social has been around for years, making slow progress: maybe becoming available on Ning's 1.5 million different sites will help.

Ning Apps allow network owners to provide additional functionality to their users, often through integration with other sites. For example, Ning is currently highlighting video apps from Qik, Hulu and UStream and collaboration apps from Box.net and Google Docs. In total, there are more than 90 apps available, with more coming soon, as the Ning team explains on the official blog.

Customized site designs are a big draw for Ning, and the apps have all been designed to match your network's appearance, so you don't have to worry about becoming a Fugly Friday candidate when you add new features. Apps also integrate with Ning's tabbed navigation, letting you add an app as a separate tab that you can organize and rearrange. OpenSocial developers can also build their own Ning apps, so don't despair if you don't see one you want - it might be on the way soon.

[via CNET]

Zoho has launched a new feature that lets you access Zoho's suite of web office documents from Faceboo, iGoogle., Orkut, or any web page that either supports OpenSocial XML or lets you embed an iframe. Zoho Gadgets are little widgets that provide you with an overview of the following Zoho services:

• Zoho Docs
• Zoho Mail
• Zoho Calendar
• Zoho Tasks
• Zoho Contacts
• Zoho Planner

In other words, you can add a widget to Facebook that will let you see the latest documents in your Zoho Docs account, allowing you to click an item to open and edit it. Or you could add your Zoho Calendar or task list to your iGoogle page.

Using the OpenSocial XML option, you can also add Zoho Gadgets to your Gmail sidebar. First you need to enable the Add Any Gadget option in Gmail Labs. Then you just click the OpenSocial XML link next to the Zoho Gadget you want to add and copy and paste the URL into the Gadgets section under your Gmail settings.

I have to say, the Zoho Tasks gadget doesn't work nearly as well as the Remember The Milk gadget for Gmail. And when I tried adding events to the Zoho Calendar gadget they didn't show up, unlike the Google Calendar gadget that's available from Gmail Labs. But the Zoho Docs gadget worked just as you'd expect.

The one problem with adding a bunch of gadgets to your Gmail sidebar is that Google still doesn't provide an easy way to rearrange the gadgets. They show up in the order you add them. So if you want the Zoho Docs gadget to show up near the top of the sidebar, you'll have to uninstall any other gadgets you have, install Zoho Docs, and then reinstall your other gadgets. Update: I stand corrected. You can enable Navbar Drag and Drop in Gmail Labs to reposition items in your sidebar. Thanks Tom!

Welcome to Googleholic, your sometimes weekly, often infrequent, fix of everything Google.

This week:

• OpenSocial API adds hooks for My Yahoo! and other popular languages
• Picasa 3.1 comes out swinging
• iPhone and Android get optimized search results
• Twitter connects to Google Friend Connect
• Port your Google Webtoolkit app to Facebook in 10 minutes
• YouTube goes HD
• Chromeaholic: Password security and RSS discovery

Welcome to Googleholic, your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:

• Upload PDFs to Google Docs
• Google I/O sessions now online
• Edit the Google Mobile page
• Easy way to export gCal ICS files
• Use Google Docs for Craigslist ads
• Google's agreement with Yahoo!

Do you have an idea for a widget or Facebook app? Maybe you either don't have the time or the full knowledge to actually make it?

You reallllly want to make Wolverines vs. Dracula Part 8 for Facebook, and it frustrates you. Well be frustrated no more, in steps Zembly.

As you know, companies have been formed around building Facebook apps, some of them have become wildly successful AND profitable. Now it's our turn.

Zembly is funded by Sun Microsystems and targets easy creation of applications for Facebook, OpenSocial, meebo, and other social platforms. Not to mention, they're blowing open the barrier to entry on creating these things, and starting a community around doing just that.

Today, Zembly has opened a private beta of their site which lets you very easily create widgets and apps in your browser. Check out their blog for more details.

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:

• Google I/O round-up
• Use Google to reference your JavaScript libraries
• Google Web Toolkit 1.5 RC
• Other random Google bits

For the average web user, Friend Connect means you're going to see social data cropping up on a whole bunch of websites that never included social networks before. You'll basically be able to plug in your information from any of the participating networks where you have a profile, and then you can interact with other users of the site who do the same. It's basically like a mini-Facebook built into any site.

What does this mean for site owners? Well, Google is promising to make setting up Friend Connect on your site ridiculously easy -- which is why we think you're going to start seeing it everywhere on the web. It basically generates the entire code for you, to be pasted into your existing site. If you're interested in trying it out, you can apply to Google now.

Been busy spending the past week telling the press about your extramarital affairs, history of drug use, and misuse of campaign funds? Here are a few stories you might have been too busy to read.

Adobe Photoshop Express Beta launches

After months of hype, the big day finally arrived. Adobe launched a free, online version of Photoshop, the industry standard in image editing. You won't find all the bells and whistles that come with the desktop version of Photoshop. After all, Adobe does still want to sell you software. But Photoshop Express will definitely give existing online image editors like Picnik and FotoFlexer a run for their money.

8 steps to a more professional Blogspot blog

Look, we know that most folks think it's blasphemy to use the words "professional" and "blogspot" in the same sentence. But hear us out. Google's blogging service offers free web hosting, unlimited bandwidth, and a surprisingly tweakable template. We've gathered 8 or so of our favorite tips for making your Blogspot site look as good as good as any WordPress blog.

Kevin Marks talks Open Social with Download Squad's Christina Warren from Download Squad on Vimeo.
With all the buzz around OpenSocial, it's easy to get lost in hype. While we were at SXSW we caught up with Kevin Marks, a man with more techno-credibility than you can shake a stick at. He's currently working on OpenSocial for Google, and he's got a lot to say about the concepts behind organizing and connecting the diaspora which is the current state of the social web. Our own Christina Warren cuts through the hype in this short interview.

Yahoo!, MySpace and Google announced the creation of the OpenSocial Foundation today. The foundation is a non-profit entity aimed at ensuring "...open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property."

On the final day of SXSW Interactive 2008, we were lucky enough to sit down with Kevin Marks from Google's OpenSocial project. Kevin broke down what OpenSocial is, where it is going (MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut among others had already signed on as of our interview) and what the plans are for the future. We'll be posting our interview with Marks shortly.

In the meantime, you can read more about the new foundation after the jump

Love them or hate them, Facebook applications are what makes the social networking site what it is. Back when MySpace, Friendster, and other sites let you connect with friends, leave messages, and maybe even play some music, Facebook let you send snowballs, play Scrabble, and graph your bestest friends.

The only problem with Facebook applications is that up until now, you've had to actually visit Facebook to access them. OK, sure, that makes sense. But as Google promotes its OpenSocial initiative which will let people develop applications that can run on any website, Facebook's approach was starting to look a bit antiquated.

Now Facebook has upped the ante by releasing a JavaScript client library that lets you add a Facebook application to any site. That means you can visit Joe Schmo's home page and still play a game of Scrabulous with your Facebook contacts. You know, if Hasbro and Mattel don't shut it down.

There appears to be some debate in the developer community about how significant this announcement was. Facebook had already released an API for writing applications. And some developers have created applications that can be hosted on other sites. But by releasing the JavaScript library, developers can create multi-site applications that do not require any server-side code, making it incredibly easy for anyone to embed an application on their site.

[via All Facebook]

Google has added a new way to share your favorite feeds and articles with friends, through Google Talk, aka the Gmail address book.

Google Reader has included a "Share" button for a while now, but if you wanted people to actually read your shared listings, you had to direct them to a URL or RSS feed. Now your Google Talk contacts can also see the items you're sharing on their Google Reader page.

Next time you login to Google Reader, you should notice a few of your Google Talk contacts' names hanging out in the navigation panel on the left side of the screen. Google Reader will tell you how many items they're sharing, and let you scroll through their shared item feed as if you have subscribed to it. You can also manage your friends list so that only certain people can see your shared items.

This is a great way to check in with friends to get feed recommendations for websites you might have never visited before, or interesting articles that you have passed by. Or is it Google's stealth social network in the works?

And the open developer platform war has just become a little more interesting. OK, that's a lie. It still isn't all that interesting, but it has now become a tad more complex. Just hours after social networking site Bebo announced that their Open Application Developer Platform (which goes live tonight) would be "100 percent compatible with the Facebook platform", Facebook has pulled out a trump card of sorts, by announcing in their developers blog, plans to share the Facebook API with other social networking sites. Details are sparse right now (a bit more information is available on the Facebook Developers Wiki), but the potential is both promising for application developers and detrimental to competing open development platforms. As the blog entry states:

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we'll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms.

This announcement comes six weeks after Google, in what many saw as little more than a bid to take some of the attention away from Facebook, announced its still developing OpenSocial API framework. In the interim, other social networking sites have either signed on with OpenSocial or announced their own attempts at an open developer platform (or more commonly, as with the perpetually late-to-the-party Friendster, both). This has quickly changed the context in the war among social networking sites from one about footprint and user base, into one about Web 2.0 developer platforms.

Frankly, as much as we appreciate some of the more cool and ingenious social networking applications, we really wish that the network developers themselves would get back to focusing on us, the users, and our overall site experience -- rather than how many corporations they can coax into infiltrating our networks. The whole Facebook Beacon scandal didn't affect us much because we didn't use many of the more egregious applications in the first place (we didn't really see the benefit in installing an application from Blockbuster or Overstock.com or another e-tailer on our Facebook page, simply because we could), but we still think it was just a foreshadowing of the future of social networking spheres, if the focus continues to be on the development platform of the site, rather than actual site development.

[via Webware]

LinkedIn, the professional networking site, has released new features, including a homepage redesign and developer platform. Sure this is going to be a little more useful to business users, but does LinkedIn need to expand and focus outside the business sector to make things stickier?

LinkedIn's new focus seems like an effort to emulate what Facebook has had with outside web applications. The new LinkedIn beta homepage provides customizable modules that display network updates in a dashboard format. This allows users to potentially be more productive by showing what contacts are up to, what news is most important to colleagues and questions and answers from your specific industry with the use of familiar feeds. But why stop there?

People that do business together and are connected via outside interests could possibly do a lot more on the site if more personal based modules were available. However, this is just the beginning of a component that is part of Google's OpenSocial developer platform so we will have to wait and see what becomes of it.

Nonetheless it's great to see that LinkedIn is growing...mind you slowly, and cautiously building upon their platform. Will it manage to pull back business users that slipped away to Facebook for more personal networking with these developments? Could it possibly ever attract younger users?

Microsoft became the market leader in operating system deployment largely by making its OS and software available to any hardware maker that wanted to license the technology. Apple, on the other hand, has always insisted the its OS should only run on Apple-labeled computers. So while Microsoft is often slammed for not being "open," the company owes much of what it is to early openness.

And it looks like Microsoft arch rival Google may be playing the same card when it comes to social networking. The company's OpenSocial social networking platform allows third party companies to partner with Google. While Facebook opened up its API earlier this year, allowing third parties to create applications, Google has attracted some major players, including MySpace, Six Apart, and Bebo, LinkedIn, Ning, Friendster, Plaxo, and Hi5. That's sort of the equivalent of getting IBM and HP on your side.

But here's what makes OpenSocial different. You'll notice that some of the big names in there are other social networks. That's because OpenSocial is a platform, not a website. MySpace, Friendster, and other social networks partnering with Google will use OpenSocial APIs, meaning if you develop an application for one site it will function on all the other sites.

In other words, OpenSocial isn't a social networking site. It's a common set of APIs that will be used by social networking sites -- and Google is behind the initiative, which gives them the same kind of status here that Microsoft had in the early days of desktop operating systems. You know, if you think desktop OSes and social networks are comparable, which they're probably not.