Welcome to the 1,000th issue of the Web Applications Alert newsletter! It's amazing to think how far we've come with Web stuff in the almost 10 years that have elapsed since this newsletter started.

If I had to pick just one area that has changed everything in the Web applications there’s no doubt in my mind: It isn’t AJAX, it isn’t DHTML, it isn’t CSS, or even Web 2.0 (whatever that may be). In fact the biggest change has less to do with technology in terms of hardware or software than it has to do with people. No, my pick is social networking.

In the last decade we’ve seen social networking explode (not that we called it social networking in the beginning, that’s a relatively recent term), and it has rapidly morphed not only the kinds of things we do but how we relate to each other as well as to businesses and the government.

Social networking started back in the days of the online fora that connected like-minded individuals into rolling cocktail parties (or endless shouting matches). It was the rise of services that addressed vertical markets (such as Classmates.com and FriendsReunited.co.uk) that really got things going, but it was the rise of the mega social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook that really established the value of social interaction on the Web.

In the business world, the likes of LinkedIn and Experts Exchange emerged as important drivers, and more recently services like GetSatisfaction have created a new social networking context. All of these services supported presence (announcing yourself and your interests) and enabled dialog and with the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people their effect was huge.

Then there was the rise of blogging. Blogging transformed what we think of as “The Media” and, much to the disgust of the old guard “mainstream media,” has usurped their sacred territory with voices that many consider to be less biased (or at least honestly biased) and more timely. But it’s the interactivity of the majority of blogs – the ability for readers to make comments and post links to other resources – that makes blogs such a crucial part of the social networking world.

Alongside all of the foregoing social networking services arose the collaborative filtering services such as Digg, del.icio.us, and Technorati that provided yet another aspect of socializing: Communicating what you pay attention to – what resources and content you think have value.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.