The OpenSocial Foundation today announced here at CeBIT, the world’s leading high-tech event showcasing digital IT and telecommunications solutions, the launch of a new effort to define, design and release a next generation social application tool kit. This project will include an evolution of the OpenSocial specification and a new open source effort focused on streamlining and simplifying the approach to tightly integrated collaboration across social applications for both enterprises and consumers.

“We have seen a significant evolution in the use cases and underlying technology of social enabled applications over the past 10 years,” says Matt Tucker, chief technology officer and co-founder of Jive Software. “It is time that the standards driving the interoperability between social applications evolve along the lines of a leaner, more agile approach.”

To support the project launch, OpenSocial Foundation board members including Mark Weitzel, foundation president, will represent the foundation during the CeBIT conference in Germany as well as participate in a panel on the future of social business.

The OpenSocial Foundation was established in 2008 with the charter to provide the leading and most mature standards-based component model for SaaS-delivered social business applications. As an industry recognized standards body, the OpenSocial Foundation provides the forum for social business application companies like IBM, Jive and SugarCRM as well as industry leading consulting companies including the Dachis Group to jointly define the interoperability standards for today’s rapidly growing social applications market.

"We have OpenSocial support on the SAP Jam roadmap as an integral way to integrate enterprise applications in today's social workplace," says Sameer Patel, general manager of Enterprise Social Software for SAP.

In the past five years, the foundation has led the social collaboration industry with efforts in defining groundbreaking new technology developments like the Embedded Experience and Social Feeds.

"Great adoption is driven by culture and technology. Embedding social capabilities into business process and applications drives higher engagement and adoption in any organization – and those are the core elements of achieving strong ROI,” says Sandy Carter, vice president of Social Business Evangelism and Sales at IBM “IBM continues our leadership of OpenSocial to accelerate market value while maximizing existing IT investments"

With the launch of this new effort, the OpenSocial Foundation is setting the strategic direction for the OpenSocial community on the path of defining and implementing a new approach to the underlying components of an interconnected set of socially-aware applications.

“There is no better implementation of an open standard than through an open source project,” remarks Clint Oram, chief technology officer and co-founder of SugarCRM. “By committing to both an evolution of the specification and the surrounding open source projects incorporating the latest developments in HTML5, modern browser technologies and JavaScript libraries like node.js and jQuery, the OpenSocial Foundation is responding to the demands of its community.”

To participate in the definition of the next generation of open social technology standards, please contact the foundation at president@opensocial.org.

About the OpenSocial Foundation

The OpenSocial Foundation is an industry-recognized standards body dedicated to advancing the social web through community innovation and open source. Widely supported by a majority of leading consumer and enterprise social platforms, such as IBM, Jive, and SugarCRM, the OpenSocial specification fosters the development of a growing set of socially aware off-the-shelf applications. Through open source projects such as Apache Rave and Shindig, it provides a well-defined way for 3rd-party applications to richly interact with users directly in their activity stream.