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Remember OpenSocial, Google's open-source platform for building applications that let users throw sheep at each other on any social network, not just Facebook? "At this point it looks like we'll make a couple more revisions to the API before it's baked enough for launch," Googler Arne Roomann-Kurrik tells partners in a Google Group dedicated to OpenSocial. "This puts us into January before the API is ready. Expect some early adopters to have a public launch early 2008." In the meantime, Google's vaunted partners are all off launching developer platforms on their own.

LinkedIn will announce its own developer platform on December 10 . Friendster has already announced its own. MySpace, though it may have been hoping OpenSocial would spare it the expense of developing its own platform, is well on its way to copying all things Facebook.