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With the recent growth of Friendster and the change of CEO, comes the announcement of Friendster’s support for OpenSocial Apps. It now joins the likes of Netlog, Yiqi, Orkut and others who support the OpenSocial platform. This means that like Facebook, Friendster will also have the functionality of apps to its disposal which can be both a good thing as well as a bad thing as we’ve seen lots of spam being generated in social networks ( such as Facebook ) due to these apps. Friendster had launched its developer platform last October but this move now means that all OpenSocial apps will be available for Friendster instead of like before, when apps specially made for Friendster were allowed.

The Friendster and OpenSocial apps will co exist, without any apparent differences to the end user . The application directory will be open to users and submissions for apps by developers are open now.

A little background on OpenSocial from Tech Crunch:

Google’s OpenSocial platform allows developers to create a a single application that will work across multiple social newtorks that support the platform’s API. Along with Friendster, other major sites that have pledged support to the platform include MySpace, Bebo, and Six Apart.

Facebook uses it’s own closed platform and hasn’t allowed access to Google Friend Connect as well so far. This makes it the only major network which stands apart in the developer platforms for social networks. Friendster’s move to OpenSocial marks another victory for the platform and Facebook will have to adopt to an open standard to keep developers from moving to OpenSocial as that would mean a single app would run on multiple huge networks instead of one closed platform network like Facebook.