Faster than a speeding bullet, Facebook has managed to go from a casual place for creator Mark Zuckerberg’s fellow Harvard students to come together and socialize, to, according to Reuters, having 24 million active users, with that number increasing by over 100,000 a day.  Not too shabby. 

Now, at its f8 developer conference in San Francisco, Facebook has announced that they’re created a new platform which allows third-party developers to create their own applications for use on the popular Web site.  So far, about 85 applications have been created, with contributions from large companies such as Microsoft and Digg.com to smaller, lesser known companies as well. 

Here’s the part where I have to brag; I’m all verklempt!  Two of the companies in attendance at this conference are being run by fellow University of Arizona alumni.  Mosoto, which was created Paul Chung and Girard Kelly (my former downstairs neighbors), along with Seth Lesky, Louis Tran, and Srinivasan Chandrasekharan, essentially lets you share files, chat with friends, and discover new ones by finding common interests.  When I casually started asking Paul questions, he laughed and said that I was sounding “like an interview,” but after reading a great Techcrunch article, I’ve found that this application has several cool features, the most interesting of which is being able to upload 1GB of music to a free Box.net account that lets you mix songs from your friends’ accounts into your own play lists.  Mosoto is now in beta, and definitely worth a look!

Another friend that I met almost immediately after moving into the dorms during my freshman year was Matt Van Horn, who is now the COO of Zimride.  This is a very unique platform that calls itself, “the future of carpool and rideshare travel.”  In using this platform, Facebook users can search a listing of people who have made travel plans, befriend and get to know someone who is going to the same place, and ultimately, make the ride with them.  This is a great gathering place for people who don’t have a car, people who do have a car and want to make a few extra bucks by offering a ride, and/or people who just enjoy the feeling of being environmentally friendly while whizzing past all the people who weren’t smart enough to find a carpool.

I guarantee that if you’re already a Facebook addict, you’ll more than likely never turn off your computer with new applications such as Mosoto and Zimride.  Overall, I’m still unsure about issues that Facebook will have in relation to security and bandwidth, but I still believe that this is a huge step towards expanding Facebook into that utopian all-purpose destination on the Web that everyone seems to be striving towards.

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