Today the OpenSocial alliance announced the official launch of the OpenSocial foundation. The organization’s purpose it to keep OpenSocial as a separate entity which is independent of ownership by any individual group. The current participants are hi5, Google, Flixster, MySpace and Yahoo! Today’s announced came with the launch of the OpenSocial Foundation website which appears to be simply a source of information.

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Today hi5 announced the release of the OpenSocial 0.8 standard which has been in beta for the past few weeks. According to the release, over 1,800 applications have been installed on the platform to date. The most significant change here? The launch of a RESTful API which enables developers to choose their development language rather than being forced into Javascript. This is a huge upgrade for the OpenSocial standard.

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