Los Angeles - News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace on Thursday announced the public launch of its Application Gallery, which features more than 1,000 approved applications for the service developed using the Developer Platform the company launched in February. MySpace rival Facebook has been offering a developers' platform since last May, while Google announced its OpenSocial social media development platform in November.

London - Social music discovery service Last.fm, a unit of CBS (NYSE: CBS), on Thursday released a music application for the 122,000 communities on Ning, a collection of niche social networks. Users of the Ning platform will be able to add Last.fm's application, which displays favorite artists and allows site visitors to launch a radio station based on any of the user's chosen artists. The application was designed to take advantage of Google's (NASD: GOOG) new OpenSocial standard, which will allow such applications to run across a variety of social networks, blogs and websites.

Today Google made its official announcement (DMW coverage) of the networks that have joined their OpenSocial initiative. By adding sites not yet named in Tuesday's NYTimes piece, namely the addition of MySpace, we have a completely different picture of the combined OpenSocial sites compared to Facebook. By popular requests here's an updated chart:

Mountain View, Calif. - Days after Google's (NSDQ: GOOG) plans to launch an open platform for social media applications were made public, the company said on Thursday that it has signed a deal with News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace that will enable its OpenSocial applications to run on the world's largest social network.

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?

Mountain View, Calif. - Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is set to launch OpenSocial, a platform for developing social applications that can run across all social networks and websites.