Business Week Article The popular online social networking site, Facebook, as well as other social networking sites such as Friendster and Myspace are beginning to open up their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), allowing third parties to essentially build their own applications using the content and function provided by these online social networks. The most popular of these sites among college students - Facebook - which has 17 million registered users according to the article, is anticipating a major boost in popularity and even more widespread use with the addition of third-party applications.

Throughout history, social networks have always been somewhat limited in their “connectedness” because it was really impossible to actually be in contact with all of your acquaintances at any given time. Landline telephones revolutionized social networks by allowing people to much more quickly establish (or, in the case of acquaintances, re-establish) contact with eachother than it was ever possible through the postal service. The public introduction of dial-up internet and later the takeoff of home broadband as well as cellular phone service further revolutionized social networks. In a sense, these technological innovations allowed social networks to not only be “more connected” but to expand, as it was much easier to keep logs of people you emailed or save a contact into a cell phone than it was to keep manual records of home phone calls or postal mail sent or received. Additionally, the internet and email allowed for more casual relationships to flourish - people who may not have taken the time to call one another or send cards through the mail to may feel more compelled to stay in touch when all it takes is the touch of a few buttons and very little time.

With online social networking sites, like Facebook, the limitation has always been that you have to be at your computer, on the actual networking site to stay in contact with all of your online “friends.” With the opening of Facebook’s and others’ APIs, and the eventual development of mobile interfaces for these online social networks, social networks should become even more connected and grow even further. People will, in essence, never be “disconnected” from their online friends. As such, casual acquaintances will be even easier to establish and, more importantly, to keep, leading to a more “connected” world than the one we currently live in.