Moreover, the OpenSocial Foundation, with its broad industry support and its community-driven process for advancing the tools and APIs, offers more participation to developers to have a say, according to Glazer.

"Developers care a lot about knowing that any standard they bet their livelihood on is one they have influence over and that can't be steered for the benefit of any one vendor," Glazer said.

With or without Facebook's participation, OpenSocial is delivering on its goal, said Luke Rajlich, co-founder and COO of My Mini Life, which operates a social networking Web site and offers an application of the same name.

OpenSocial has made it much easier for to port its eponymous application to a variety of social networking sites that support the project, including Google's Orkut, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Ning, he said. The company built its first application for the Facebook platform, before OpenSocial was available.

"There are some differences between OpenSocial containers but we're able to deploy in new containers pretty rapidly. It has helped us grow more rapidly than we could have otherwise," said Rajlich, using the term "container" to refer to the OpenSocial implementations of different Web sites.