The New York Times reported yesterday that Google, working with an alliance of companies including; Linkedin, Plaxo, Friendster and Hi5 to write standards for social networking applications including Google's Orkut. The big question, can a collection of social networks tied together with a standard for application development challenge the fastest growing social network - Facebook?

To shed some light on the topic, I assembled a quick custom category of the sites mentioned in the article (Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, Linkedin and Ning, which appeared below the dectile). Here's how then stack-up against each other:

Now lets compare the combined group of OpenSocial sites against Facebook (market share of visits for the U.S., weekly data). Notice that currently Facebook is almost 10x the size of the combined OpenSocial group.

As far as the future, as we've learned in the 2.0 space category leadership can change in a matter of weeks. Facebook's clear defense is the entrenchment of users and the pain of switching. If Google's new group can build an app to port-over all my Facebook friends it would go along way towards breaking down barriers-to-entry.

Bill Tancer

This post originally appeared on Bill Tancer's blog here. Bill is the General Manager, Global Research at Hitwise. His bio can be viewed here.