Social networking has been documented both on and offline.  It includes sites such as Facebook, Digg, Youtube, Flickr and many, many more.  Initially started as a way for many people to easily establish online relationships, re-establish lost relationships, easily share views, videos, photos and opinions and to build an online network of acquaintances, it has now become so much more.

Marketing companies now advertise for Web 2.0, social networking savvy markteters.  Knowledge preferred to include creation and maintenance of blogs, SEO and the ability to write real content.  Even the spin doctors behind the US Presidential elections have caught on and are utilizing Digg and Youtube to promote the candidates to the new generation of Internet Sociarati.

For example social networking on Youtube is more than just setting up an account, uploading videos, sending out a few emails and hoping that people will find the video using the tags that describe the content.  To really get the video seen, if that’s the aim, there is a need to subscribe to other users’ videos, comment on the videos and create video responses.  Posting links to the video on Facebook, Digg, Reddit and any other site where large networks of friends have already been or are being established.  On top of that, if the video is particularly good, whether in an informative way, humorous or some other form of stickiness, it can be submitted to television shows that promote online videos.  An example of this is Sky News daily Youtube roundup.

The next step is providing an application that will be used by the masses of the Sociariti.  Right now on Facebook, there seem to be hundreds of new applications appearing daily.  These applications range from trivia quizzes to online poker, matchmaking applications to greeting cards.  These applications can be written by anyone who learns the FBML (Facebook Markup Language), a simple code that most talented developers have no problem learning very quickly.

In competition with Facebook applications Google launched a product called OpenSocial back in November 2007.  Just last week, saw the announcement that Yahoo and MySpace will be joining forces with Google on OpenSocial.  This will greatly increase the reach of application developers and clever marketers out to attract the Sociarati.  In addition, Facebook have made a conscious decision not to be a part of OpenSocial.  More details of OpenSocial can be found on the official Website.

Below is the opening talk given to the developer community at the Google campfire in November 2007: