MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Google Inc announced on Friday that they are joining forces to launch OpenSocial — a set of common APIs for building social applications across the web.

The partnership spearheads an initiative to standardise and simplify the development of social applications. Friday’s announcement underscores MySpace’s commitment to supporting standards that foster innovation in an increasingly social web.

As a founding member of OpenSocial, MySpace will provide critical user mass and platform guidance. The OpenSocial standards are designed to evolve through contribution from the open source community and as new features are developed by various partners.

Global members of the OpenSocial community include Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

Launch of OpenSocial is the first release of technical details for the forthcoming MySpace Platform.
 Starting tonight, developers can start writing applications for OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial which the MySpace Platform will support at launch.