Meeting and greeting friends and neighbors used to happen on the street corner of your town. Now, more and more frequently, it happens with an instant message, e-mail or in an online social network. We've traded the actual physical or spoken interaction with a whole new form of interaction that's more convenient and more efficient.

Online social networking started small, in simple, text based chat rooms. Today, it is a sociological and marketing phenomenon, with massive virtual communities dedicated not only to friendship and chilling out, but to developing and implementing cutting-edge investment, technology and marketing. With a two hundred and forty million dollar investment from computer giant Microsoft, Facebook is now at the center of the action, having been deemed the major player in this new internet age.

Founded over three years ago by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard drop-out, Facebook's fifty million-plus member site still lags behind MySpace in numbers. But with two hundred thousand new users joining every day, Facebook definitely has the momentum. The reason? A dramatic change of policy by Facebook management that has breathed new creative life into the whole concept of online social interaction.

The revolution began in May 2007, when Facebook offered outside developers and companies a share of advertising revenue in exchange for crating unique new applications for the site. Over five thousand new applications appeared within six months - transforming Facebook with tools allowing users to do everything from dedicating a song to battling another user in a zombie fight to drawing on a wall to giving a friend a "hatching" egg with a surprise inside. Suddenly, users could spend hours on Facebook, enhancing their profiles and interacting with their friends in thousands of unusual ways.

This took Facebook to a Web 2.0 / Web 3.0 level and approached the elusive web semantic ideal where a layered online community would interact in totally new and self-contained ways - and attracted highly-desirable and intelligent computer users who were a natural new marketing base.

This marketing base is why Facebook is so attractive to a corporation like Microsoft - and why internet marketers at all levels are looking for ways to get their messages into this amazing new social system that's experiencing the kind of explosive growth that comes along rarely.

That new database is a large part of the reason companies like Microsoft, as well as Google and Yahoo!, are so intent on understanding and taking advantage of what's happening at Facebook. When users latch on to a site so quickly, like they did with YouTube, it's a phenomenon that can't be ignored.

So if you're ready to do battle with the big boys like Google and Microsoft, it's time to arm yourself. Facebook marketing software like Stealth Friend Bomber, Facebook Edition can give you unprecedented access to the same audience they spend millions to reach. Which already makes you look like a winner.