For those of my friends who’ve been wondering what I’ve been so heads-down on lately, I’m happy to finally share the news that Yahoo! has announced support for the development of OpenSocial, by working with MySpace and Google to set up an independent foundation for its long-term stewardship. I hope this will turn out to be OpenSocial’s best “container” yet.

OpenSocial is already in the open in the sense that it’s available for use by anyone, and has been since it first came out last November. The spec is published with a Creative Commons license, and there’s reference code put out under an Apache open-source license. There’s been lots of community collaboration on it, and Google has been a good custodian in bringing it this far along.

What putting it in a foundation does is ensure access to the future direction of the spec is open to everyone, and create a way for contributions to be protected from patent lawsuits and IP contamination (for people and companies that have to worry about those arcane but very real kinds of impediment to intellectual collaboration). Most importantly, it means application developers, containers, and would-be contributors alike can take a bet on this technology with the benefit of knowing it’s free (as in beer, and as in speech) forever, that a community of developers is out there building on it, and that they won’t get box-canyoned into proprietary code.

OpenSocial itself still has plenty of maturing to do, but millions of users of twitter, facebook and even old-skool social apps like evite know how great application experiences that tap into your social network can be. Now OpenSocial has every chance to become the Wordpress of social app platforms and yield a similarly rich ecosystem of innovation around it. Kudos to Google here - helping OpenSocial take root by putting it out in the open isn’t just a smart thing to do (even though it means giving up “ownership” of it); it’s the right thing to do.
Helping close this deal for Yahoo! has been a great experience for me personally, too. In addition to helping Yahoo! walk the talk, having a lot of fun, and learning more than I ever thought I would about patent non-assertion, I’ve also gotten to know a very smart and passionate bunch of people at Google, MySpace, and my own employer during this.

So I guess now that it’s public, it’s time to join Orkut and add some new folks to my MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plaxo networks - I’m sure they’ll be inviting me to join causes, share restaurant reviews, and throw monkeys soon!

UPDATE: Blog posts are starting to come in. You probably know where to find them, but I particularly like this quote from CNET: “It’s like the Justice League of social media”!

I’ve been following with interest the controversy surrounding Jason Calcanis’s post How to save money running a startup. I’m not sure why people get so huffy about these things, but in any case there’s not a word in his post I don’t agree with.

But there’s a missing ingredient here: leadership. Because there’s a name for a place where people work 24/7 without coffee or lunch breaks, optimize their workspaces so they can multi-task and be more productive while working, then take their work home with them, and continue this ad nauseum. It’s called a grind. No matter how passionate people are about the company, eventually they will run out of gas.

Successful leaders of small teams, in a startup or otherwise, are able to create both a vision for the long-term and a sense of urgency around reaching each of the many serial interim milestones. And, equally importantly, to find ways to celebrate and blow off steam between sprints.

Whether it’s bottles of wine that double in size for different user-number goals and are then drunk and signed by the team, outings tied to revenue goals, or just good old-fashioned partying after the big release (all of which I’ve used or seen work), how you infect other people with your passion and drive is probably even more important than creating the conditions that optimize for them.

I’m very excited that Fire Eagle has launched to developers as of this morning.

It’s a project I’ve been supporting out of Brickhouse, and the team that’s been developing it has been working incredibly hard to get it ready for launch. I’m delighted to see the eagle fly — and even more eager to see what developers and users make of it.

If you’d like a beta invitation, drop me a line — now you know where to find me.

On the few occasions I’ve had to hear Tim O’Reilly speak, I’ve never failed to come away inspired.

A couple of choice anecdotes and quotes from his opening keynote at Etech last night:

• “Hackers change the world while having fun”
• On Col. Kittinger, the guy who went up in a weather balloon, skydove out, hit the speed of sound without a vehicle, and was laying out of it on the ground — his friend ran up and gave him the finger to celebrate his statement: “There are always people who say it can’t be done. Just give ‘em the one-finger salute and keep on going.”
• Wrestle with the angels. Attack the hard problems.
• Things they are paying attention to at O’Reilly (and represented at the show):
• open-source hardware
• sensors and ambient computing / data mining open platforms and implicit web
• bionics / people hacking / brain hacking
• personal genomics
• collective intelligence (”Larry Lessig is the Matt Cutts of government.”)
• climate change
• Rilke’s “The Man Walking”

In talking to an entrepreneur considering several projects of various levels of commercial strength, he was reminded of the Cookie Monster winning a game show on Sesame Street. Behind Door #1: a million dollars in cash. Door #2, a castle and a yacht. Behind Door #3: a cookie. You know where Tim’s going. . as the audience starts chanting like the Cookie Monster. . .

“Choose the cookie!”