Does your company have a product that would thrive in an online social networking community? If it does, you are in need of a custom social network application. There are many social networks that allow third party applications to run on their platform.

Google has recently announced the launch of opensocial. Opensocial is is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information
• Friend Information
• Activities

The social networks that have partnered with Google on this are: MySpace, Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. This open platform allows you to develop a single application that will function within all of the above social networks.

Facebook is the fastest growing online social networking community with 42 million active members worldwide and is expected to surpass 60 million by the end of 2007. From September 2006 to September 2007 facebook increased its world wide ranking from 60th to 7th most visited website, and was the number one site for photos in the US, ahead of photo sharing site flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily. According to Chris Hughes a spokesman for Facebook, “People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook.” This level of user interaction combined with its sizable user base, gives companies a huge incentive to try and leverage facebook for their own business. As facebook has grown, the company has opened up their platform to allow third parties the ability to create custom applications.

In order to properly leverage this medium, there are two crucial functionalities that must be present within your custom application. First, you need to develop an application that incentivizes the end user and second, the application must be relevant to your business. When Invoke develops custom social network applications, we keep these factors at the forefront.

Invoke’s social network application development process follows the following steps:

1. Brainstorming session to determine the functionality required and the business goals of the application.
2. Create documentation that outlines the development process.
3. Develop custom application.
4. Test on various social network developers platforms.
5. Client walk through.
6. Pre-launch application.
7. Testing.
8. Launch custom application.

Invoke Media has developed custom applications for several in-house and client initiatives with great success. If you would like more information about creating and launching a custom application for your business, contact Invoke today.