This OpenSocial project is a joint research and development by VastPark and Swinburne's Centre of IT Research, started in 2006. It is different and separate from Google's OpenSocial . It existed and was named before Google announced the release of their project.

OpenSocial is a framework for forming and managing a distributed social ecosystem using intelligent peer-to-peer technology. Unlike the physical world where social ecosystems are formed from the integrated and managed relationships between individuals and organisations, the online digital world consists of many independent, isolated and incompatible social networks established by organisations that have overlapping and manually managed relationships. To bring the online digital world in-line with the physical world, integration of social networks, identification of overlapping relationships in social networks, and automation of relationship management in social networks are required. OpenSocial is a framework that enables social networks to interlink and self-organise into a social ecosystem guided by the policies of individuals and organisations.

As an example, a user can connect to its social network of friends that span multiple digital realms (e.g. VastPark and Facebook); and the user may have multiple social networks (e.g. work colleagues and club members). These social networks can be managed independently such that the relations and interactions may differ.