By ZWELI MOKGATA

COMPUTER software development companies are cashing in on the rapid boom of social networking sites.

With more than 200 million users on MySpace alone, and 60 million worldwide on Facebook, software developers are taking advantage of the exploding market.

Cape Town-based Textstream, which also has offices in Atlanta in the US, provides fun applications for more than three million Facebook users and is now expanding into other social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace.

Steven Bayback, Textstream’s product manager, said: “We have found that the simpler applications are having the most response from users and advertisers. We use PHP and MySQL, two basic programming languages, but they are still working very well for us.”

What initially started out as a nonchalant dose of fun and experimentation has resulted in a fast-growing player in the software developing industry, which has positioned the company as one of the first engineers of some of Facebook’s most popular and widely used applications.

Textstream is a South African- founded partner company to leading software developer Fontera. It has doubled its staff complement in six months as a result of growing demand for its various products, and intends growing at a rapid rate.

Simon Leps, chief executive of Textstream, explains that what was not intended to be a business venture in the first place had resulted in a massive business opportunity that was profitable from day one.

Leps said: “A few guys joking around while playing funny games could no longer be overlooked.”

The company took advantage of the perpetual popularity and money-making opportunities presented by social networking communities.

After uploading their first few applications in June 2007, one month after the official launch of Facebook’s application platform, Textstream experienced massive interest and watched the new applications spread across Facebook like online viruses.

Leps said that once they realised the reach that could be achieved with these applications, the company began exploring ways to leverage these applications for commercial gain.

“We began building branded applications for clients, facilitating ways of connecting corporations to online social communities,” Leps said.

Textstream has successfully launched specialist branded applications for Archers, Butlers Pizza, Thunda.com and Lipton Ice Tea (developed in conjunction with Cow PR).