The importance of Google’s OpenSocial could finally be starting to reveal itself – and no, I’m not talking about widgets. The company Pluck has announced a plan to link up over 50 million users of the various properties they support (The Washington Post, Reuters, Fox News, and USAToday, just to name a few) and pipe that data through its SiteLife suite back to all the social networks using both Google’s OpenSocial APIs and Facebook’s platform.

This means that if you leave a comment on a story on USAToday, you can choose to have that data fed back into your MySpace profile. Or if you want to share a story from Reuters, this can easily show up on your Facebook profile.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many different sites’ networks I now belong to (I certainly can’t remember them all). While it’s nice to have some of them separate some of the time, more often then not it’s a nuisance and leads me to stop using many of them simply because I don’t have 40 hours in my day to update all of them.

While some might not like the idea of all of this data collecting in singular places (and obviously you’ll be able to opt out), to me this is what efforts like OpenSocial should be about. Social Networking has a keyword: networking. Not networking within walled environments of select social sites, but over the entire Internet.