Just when you the thought the sharing and communication available to you on sites like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace could go no further, a recent trend has gained momentum according to today’s BusinessWeek article from Olga Kharif.

To a degree, the openness of social networking platforms has been around for a while. Witness the many MySpace photo sites that allow users to copy and past javascript code to achieve prime backgrounds or slide shows, for example.

But, Ms. Kharif’s point is a deeper integration with the API or Application Program Interface, where third party developers would write code and built interfaces that mesh seemlessly with any of these sites. Marketing Pilgrim’s Andy Beal points out that the potential is huge in terms of overall traffic growth for site such as Friendster: “Nearly 19 million new users from just a handful of developers? Imagine the growth when the API is available to anyone that cares to use it?”

Google has already tapped the third-party developer arena with tools such as their widget platform that allows users to easily insert everything from games to Comedy Central’s Joke of the Day into their personalized Google home page. Google’s social destination, orkut, popular with Brazilians in particular, is a likely next step in the API arms race.

One of my favorite sites, and also mentioned in the BW article, LinkedIn is a perfect fit for an open API. Founder Reid Hoffman and CEO Dan Nye have built a powerful community for business networking. With members who are typically accustomed to leveraging technology to get an edge in their day-to-day communication and business, additional functionality could only make LinkedIn more ’sticky’ than it already is.

Tags: linkedin, google, orkut, reid hoffman, myspace, friendster, facebook

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