Facebook’s recent decision to open up its network is already having profound implications for the internet industry. And, no, I am not referring to the fact that parents can now spy on their daughter’s new boyfriend. The “I Facebooked your mom” wisecracks (and T-shirts) are just plain wrong. Funny, but wrong.

No, I’m referring to the decision by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, to open up the site to third-party developers. Applications developers now have the keys – Facebook’s application programming interfaces (APIs) – to the world’s fastest growing web property, a move some in the tech industry are hailing as the most significant development in the internet industry since the launch of the web browser.

As Netscape’s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, says of the social network’s manoeuvre, “the leadership that the Facebook team is showing here rivals anything that the large and established software and web companies have done in this decade”.

To understand this statement, you need to get a handle on Facebook’s unprecedented growth. Not just on the user numbers, but the remarkable utility factor of the network.

As of last month, Facebook says it has more than 24 million active users, adding more than 100,000 users per day, or, as Zuckerberg says, a city the size of San Francisco every week. It does 40 billion (yes, billion) page views per month. It’s amazing to consider that a year ago the site was meant solely for university students. Now, all my LinkedIn contacts seem to ping me daily inviting me to join their Facebook network, putting my business contacts in grinning distance of my current and former university students.

Its most impressive statistics are about usage. Fifty per cent of Facebook users come to the site every day to check up on friends and contacts, spending on average 20 minutes tweaking their profiles and telling their ever-expanding network where they will be and what they are doing. Facebook members have posted more than 1.8 billion photos on the site, and Facebook claims that the traffic on its photo-sharing application alone is more than three times as large as Flickr and Photobucket combined.

This rabid user base is turning Facebook into the reigning kingmaker in the net applications world. Consider the story of iLike, a music recommendation service that launched last October. It offers recommendations on new artists from fellow members, and alerts users about when their favourite artists tour and which of their friends are planning to go.

In late May, iLike put its application up on Facebook for Facebook members to add to their profiles. The take-up was stratospheric. As the iLike team wrote on its blog, “Launching just over two weeks ago, iLike on Facebook signed up a million users in its first week; then a million more in the next 5 days, and another million in the next 4 days. We're currently signing up about 300,000 new users per day.”

This kind of viral growth for a relatively unknown start-up developer, regardless of how essential their product appears, would be impossible without the heft of a Facebook behind it. Firstly, adding 300,000 users per day would fry the start-up’s server capacity. And, only with access to such a large and active community, could an iLike be instantly plucked from obscurity into the web’s fastest growing application.

Zuckerberg believes powerful social networks can more effectively and more cheaply broadcast a message – in this case, “Check out iLike” – than, as he says, “any major company”, which, we can assume, means mainstream media. The implications loom large. If an omnivorous social network can convince millions to download an unheard-of music-referral tool overnight, imagine what it could do for a new Hollywood release or a political candidate.

Facebook’s kingmaker position could disrupt much more than the software industry. Big Business and politicians, no doubt, will be the next to join up. Get your T-shirts ready.

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Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com