OpenSocial is created by Google. You can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs. Instead of hosting your application on your own servers, you can use this service without worrying about your bandwidth demands.

This is a great resource for programmers. FAQ's, Developer's Guide and the Gadget Tutorial, and much more.

Since MySpace became so popular, social network services have been extremely influential to the businesses and general public. Let's review once again what social network services are.

Their focus is simply building online social networks for communities of people who have common interests to share, or who are interested in exploring the interests of others, and to create such an environment, forum based software is used.

The services are web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, tools like live chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion forum, and so on.

The core service of social networking is to assist users to find and connect with new friends. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook are offering various tools for this purpose. Hi5 is popular in parts of Europe, Google's Orkut in Brazil, and Friendster is the most widely used social network service in Asia.

The basic idea of getting to know other people online today seems to be somewhat different from early social networking companies wanted to promote. In many social networking sites, young teens are the majority, creating similar atmosphere to dating sites. Their basic services are all for those teens to play with. Chatting program, video or music uploading, messaging and so on. It is ironic that the services are rather causing some serious issues among teens today.

It's been a major concern for the general public that online crime through social networking sites is increasing. Both MySpace and Facebook are working hard to improve their security systems, eliminating certain individuals' accounts. Parents across the country are increasingly concerned about the safety of their children. Predators have seen visiting social networking sites such as MySpace as a prime opportunity to find new prey. An  attorney from Utah is helping to negotiate an agreement with MySpace which mandates that the site include tools to verify the age and identity of users. These tools also allow parents to limit their children's activity and delete materials they deem inappropriate. It's heartening to see industry and government leaders implement consumer protections without new legislation or cumbersome new regulation.

Social applications are add-on tools used in social software, mainly communication tools and interactive tools. These small tools became very popular among the people of social networking sites such as Facebook, but the phenomena promoted social applications to be more than just entertainment tools. As social networking sites are becoming very popular, many businesses have shown their interests in using social applications for their advertising purposes. Our goal is to provide resources and information on various social applications business with social applications, developers, and marketers, as well as those who are interested in them through our blog and directory. Use our directory of social network applications to find your favorite applications or promote your own social applications.

We also look into some of the major social networking sites and platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, Orcut, and others for news on social applications.