Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday that it was joining rival Google Inc. s initiative for creating photo-sharing and other social tools that work across the Web. News Corp. s MySpace earlier pledged support, and the three companies announced Tuesday that they were forming a nonprofit organization, the OpenSocial Foundation, to ensure that the platform remains neutral and viable. The idea behind the Google-initiated OpenSocial platform is to create a common coding standard for the applications so they work on hundreds of Web sites. The applications could permit chats, games, media sharing and more.

By contrast, sites that haven't joined OpenSocial typically rely on unique coding that has prevented widgets developed for its sites from working at other places on the Web.

The addition of Yahoo could put pressure on Facebook, the No. 2 social-networking site behind MySpace, to pledge support as well, though Facebook has had tremendous success encouraging developers to write tools specifically for it.

Other participants in OpenSocial include Friendster, hi5, LinkedIn, Ning, the Google-owned Orkut and Bebo, which Time Warner Inc. s AOL is planning to buy for $850 million.

In a company blog entry, Yahoo Vice President Wade Chambers said the company was joining OpenSocial now because "it's no longer a trial balloon - it's for real."

Chambers said Yahoo wanted to make developers feel confident about using OpenSocial as a building block for future social applications.

By creating a nonprofit to oversee OpenSocial, effective July 1, the companies want to ensure that intellectual property assets remain available to everyone. The companies said the foundation also would provide transparency and guidelines around technical and legal issues as the platform evolves.

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