Even as the economy seems to be crumbling, engineering work to enhance social networking sites is picking up.
On Friday, social network incubator Ning cracked open its doors to reveal 30 applications built on the emerging "OpenSocial" standards championed by Google. Those applications should run, with modest fiddling, on a constellation of other social networking sites supporting OpenSocial. (These include the likes of MySpace, Hi5 and others.) Ning engineers built five of the applications; outside developers contributed the rest.
The emergence of these applications could help set the pace for the next few years of social network development: if people like using them, such applications could help small social networking sites compete with the likes of industry powerhouse Facebook.
Alternatively, if they work badly or provoke yawns, that will serve as an indication of how hard the narrowly targeted social networking sites will have to work simply to stay in the game with Facebook.
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