These are really exciting times. Until recently it’s all been small standards-backed movements to build an open base for the structured web to live off of but now big players are really taking things seriously and embracing all these wonderful standards. We have all the people behind the standards pushing as hard as they can with things like OpenID, XFN, microformats, the web standards movement in general, the diso project. But now just recently amazing things have happened. First just recently Yahoo! adopted OpenID and now Google has created an API for parsing the social graph.

This is amazing. I’m speechless. I’m stoked that all this is happening so quickly and can’t wait to see how things evolve.

I wish I was working on a project right now that could utilize this new Social Graph API by Google. It’s fun testing it out but I really want to see some concrete stuff built off of it!

I sure hope that Microsoft’s recent offer to buy Yahoo! doesn’t hurt this trend. Microsoft really sucks at helping push the industry in the right direction and with the situation being as it is, I predict Yahoo! will take Microsoft’s overly generous offer and get sucked into a black hole after the fact. As Gruber mentioned, if Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo! they would probably sell off all of their properties worth anything and use it as an opportunity to gobble up new users. It sure would be amusing if people revolted and went to Google if an acquisition takes place — that would sure screw over Microsoft — I might even celebrate.

That went off on a slight tangent. Anyways, I’m happy to be experiencing all of this.