Social Networking: New ways to connect

And we thought we only had to contend with networked blogs, applications already available and Twitter-related apps.

We'll have to face many more applications after Facebook announced they were opening up to developers so they could create more programs to tap into it.

The New York Times' Brad Stone wrote an interesting article on this announcement.

TO understand the counterintuitive business wisdom infecting Silicon Valley these days, consider an imaginary corner supermarket, Joe’s Foods.

After establishing his store as a vibrant enterprise and a hive of neighborhood activity, Joe makes a strange decision: he props open the front door and invites everyone to come in, take the merchandise free of charge, and then give it away themselves.

All the extra foot traffic, Joe says, will make Joe’s Foods the social center of the community.

That is roughly comparable to what Facebook, the popular social network, did this past week. In a loud and proud public announcement, it said it didn’t care whether its members visited Facebook.com at all.

Facebook will provide tools to let other companies create programs tailed to a wide range of mobile devices like iPhone, and make it possible to share more information in more ways.

This is similar to what Twitter did - allowing third parties to create programs to help users. Numerous companies are creating new ways to access social networks.

French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur's start-up faced high costs, so he fired half the staff and developed Seesmic Desktop, which allows Facebook and Twitter users to update without logging into either one. It also allows people to create groups of more than 1,000 followers or in a certain locality. It has been downloaded about 1.5 million times.

Ian Didsworth's TweetDeck is used by more than a million people, blending Facebook and Twitter streams. Amit Kumar's SocialScope is for BlackBerry users to check multiple social networks. Glam Media's network has about 600 lifestyle sites and blogs for women, and is working on Tinker, which allows people to receive moderated or edited update streams for specific events. The company believes it offers advertising attraction.

It seems there will be many more announcements. Things are free for now, but one never knows about the future.

Stone speculates that the new companies might even smother Facebook and Twitter by attracting users and advertisers away from those sites.

There's much more. Read the complete article at the link above.