People who are leading a business, non-profit or other organization instinctively know that “online social networking” will, can, and should have a big impact. But during the busy business day, week, or month, it’s hard to find the time to translate this notion into practical strategy and performance metrics.

Although the development of functional tools have trailed transformative vision during the early stages of this important evolution, an important change has happened in social networking technology in the past six months. At the end of 2007, Google announced a standard for the exchange of information between and among social networks. OpenSocial was announced late in 2007, in partnership with the other major social networks, save Facebook, who released their own competing standard several months prior.

Last week, Google annoucned their own framework and mini-applications for integrating OpenSocial tools on almost any website, called FriendConnect.  These simple widgets are installed on any site to “socialize” it (and release your inner Stalin).

What’s the nuance?

Kevin Marks, one Google’s gurus, explains it this way:

To add personal or social features, websites need to know information about their users and their friends, but gathering and storing this is a lot of extra work. Prompting people to enter their information over and over again, for every site they visit, becomes tedious, often causing visitors to abandon the sites.

By abstracting out the ability to discover social information, OpenSocial enables web developers to write social applications that draw upon existing trusted sources that have become OpenSocial containers. However, up until now, becoming a container – adding new social applications for your users – has meant having to provide your own source of personal and social information. By using securely authenticated APIs from existing social sites, Friend Connect means any website can host OpenSocial apps.

Although some early projects have launched that integrate OpenSocial, the real payoff in simple sites where users can benefit are still in development.

Our ongoing research into practical OpenSocial applications focuses primarily on developments at LinkedIn , given their relevance to professionals and business. While MySpace, Hi5 and other mainstream social networks (yes, it’s a new oxymoron) may have more scale, the size of LinkedIn’s business audience makes them uniquely relevant to our view. We also pay pretty close attention to Duncan Work’s perspective, given his recent stint as Chief Scientist at LinkedIn, as well in founding the Global Trust Exchange.

In the spirit of figuring it all out, we’re off to Google I/O this week to meet with the leaders of this transition. For many companies trying to crack the code on building (and ultimately monetizing) vertical social networks, these new tools are providing near-leapfrog capabilities, making first-mover advantage an important consideration as more and more verticals get “socialized.”

Stay tuned for our reports, and to the geek blogs for updates that come out of Google I/O.