I wondered how Google will directly benefit from the OpenSocial API a few days ago, particularly as more bloggers believe it to be a whole lot of hot air, and now it looks like Yahoo is answering.

That is, on a day that its stock is tanking {down 7%} perhaps because of how Jerry Yang is in the unenviable position of defending his company in Congress for a thing that happened years before he assumed the CEO-ship, Yahoo is securing mobile advertising deals.

Now, call me a crude simpleton but it looks like these kinds of maneuverings are *exactly* what will pad Yahoo’s bottom line.

Reuters has the low-down which involves Yahoo’s mobile chief racing to get Yahoo’s ads in front of hundreds of millions of mobile customers before Google’s android ever sees the light of day — which is scheduled to be the latter half of 2008, practically an eternity in geek-years.

In fact the breadth of these deals seem to be pretty … well, global.

Yahoo already has deals to feature a package of services like search, e-mail and mapping on limited handsets from major phone makers, including Nokia, Motorola, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and HTC — every top name except Sony Ericsson.

Carrier partners include Vodafone in Britain and Hutchison Whampoa’s 3 across Europe, and a recent far-reaching deal Web search and advertising deal with Spain’s Telefonica that covers 100 million users in several European countries and much of the Latin American region.

Yahoo has also signed advertising deals with six operators across Southeast Asia and India. North Asia is next.

It has been in talks with operators in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia -- markets that boast some of the highest mobile penetration rates — for new service tie-ups, President Susan Decker said on a tour of Asia last month.

[emphasis mine]

Furthermore, there’s nothing to stop Yahoo from using the Android platform to help deploy its ads and ‘mobilize’ these ad deals that were made 18 months before Android ever ships out.

“If ‘Android’ is truly open source, we can take everything out there,” Boerries said of the outside possibility Yahoo might use Google phone software and run Yahoo services over the devices. “Nothing prevents me from taking it,” he said.

Deliciously Machiavellian, and simple too.  Google pwns my life as much as the next geek, but I also have a soft spot for the underdog, which Yahoo! clearly is.  In this case, and in this instance (not like how Yahoo folded like a cheap suit for the Chinese government), they’ll get my vote FTW.

Just a theoretical question to lob at you before the weekend: in all the clamour around an OpenSocial API, and how the blogosphere is polarizing it (hyping it) to be a Facebook vs. Google and Superfriends cage-match, when would an OpenSocial API *not* matter?

How about if everyone who “mattered” was already on Facebook, and was experiencing enough lock-down that they didn’t want to move social networks, and simply don’t care about the amazing cross-social applications that are developed across MySpace, Friendster, Oracle, Salesforce, and so on — because they simply don’t have friends or identities across such networks … yes, for the sake of such an example, let’s say that they either didn’t use, or didn’t care about the data and information stored through their email accounts either.

Now, to be sure that’s an extreme example of things, but I only use it to illustrate that voices like Don Dodge and Eric Schonfeld are worth listening to: the movement towards an open set of standards so social networks can communicate is a good thing … BUT — let’s not sell the power of network effects short.

In a very real, material sense, many people won’t notice or care … even if they’re told about the OpenSocial API explicitly. And that’s because for many “average” Facebookers, {and I tend to think about the kind of non-tech people at work, say, in hospital, who all love Facebook} many of their friends are not on any other networks. Many of them might have identities, or might use other networks peripherally, but to many of them there is only one which “matters” (with all due respect to Anil Dash and his colorful examples of friends and family using Vox, Livejournal, Typepad, and Photobucket) — because its a (recursive) function of where they spend their time, because its where their friends spend their time.

Facebook might have an advantage to abandoning their own standards for the OpenSocial API, but I don’t think that they’re in any position where they might need to be “forced” to; put it more bluntly, I don’t think that the failure to adopt an OpenSocial API will result in a loss of growth, due to, for example, people wanting to use new applications that aren’t able to reach into Facebook’s closed garden.

Rather, I expect many people to continue to have blank looks and shrug if I even put “OpenSocial API” and “Facebook” into the same sentence.