Facebook took social networking into new territory in May by opening up its platform to outside software developers, leading News Corporation-owned MySpace to follow suit this month.
Advertisers have taken advantage by developing applications as part of their internet marketing arsenal, for example, Fox TV show 'Family Guy' created a Facebook application this month.
The opening up of Facebook has swelled its user numbers and last week Microsoft took a $240m minority stake in the business, which is now valued at $15bn.
Although Google has trailed in social networking, its Orkut offering has 25m monthly visitors worldwide but is not well known in the US and UK, TechCrunch claims the company is busy working on catching up.
It said Google is planning an even more open approach than Facebook, which still locks users into its own platform and does not connect openly with the web.
Google is working on APIs (application programming interfaces) that developers can use to create applications that not only interface with Orkut and the personalised Google homepage iGoogle, but will work with non-Google websites.
Google's initiative is expected to be revealed in stages. In the week commencing Monday November 5, Google will reveal as many as 50 partners which have developed applications for Orkut.
There are question marks over how portable user data is between Google and non-Google websites.
TechCrunch said: "The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing you've joined yet another social network."