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Like most Internet users, software developers are showing more and more interest in social networking tools, according to a new report from a Santa Cruz, California-based IT market research firm.

 

Officials at Evans Data say in their annual “Developer Relations Program” survey – a 102-page report by Janel Garvin – that about 75 percent of 400 developers in the study belong to at least one social network and two-thirds belong to multiple networks (see chart below).

 

One source quotes the firm’s president and chief executive officer, John Andrews, as saying that developers rely on social networks to re-connect with friends and stay in touch generally.

 

“Consistent with this the primary motivations for joining a social network is the desire to locate old friends and the need for general communications,” he said, according to the India-based IT Web site Cybermedia India Online Limited, or “CIOL.”

 

Social networking sites themselves know the lay of the land all too well.

 

As TMCnet reported last month, officials at 175 million-user social networking site Facebook (News - Alert) recently introduced “Facebook Connect” for the Apple iPhone.

 

With the new tool, the IP industry is poised to see hundreds more iPhone (News - Alert) apps that allow users to log into Facebook from within, find their friends and share whatever they’re doing.

 

Announced here on Facebook’s site, Facebook Connect will further spread the gospel of a social networking tool that already feels like it’s everywhere.

 

“Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user can authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment,” Facebook officials say. “The user will have total control of the permissions granted, including offline access, status updates and email addresses. On iPhone, authentication can occur in both Portrait and Landscape orientations.”

 

According to the CIOL summary of Evans Data’s report, the top three things developers look for in a social network are profiles, an active community and high quality content. 

 

The survey also finds that 90 percent of developers look at blogs at least some time, and seventy percent feel that blogs are credible sources of information, and that Microsoft (News - Alert) has the most vaunted developers’ Web site (27.4 percent), followed by Sun (12 percent), a company that the software giant for weeks has been rumored to acquire.