Bill Bishop’s blog Billsdue alerts us to the fact that popular SNS Xiaonei.com has now followed in Facebook’s footsteps and opened up to non-college students. High school students and–here’s the part I don’t get–”office workers” have been able to join as of yesterday. (How do you tell whether someone’s an office worker as opposed, say, to a gym teacher or a purveyor of fine men’s pleather clutch purses?)

People who have worked with Xiaonei, which was acquired by Oak Pacific Interactive and merged with its own campus-based social network 5Q.com, have told me that the SNS isn’t yet ready to take the second step that made Facebook big, namely opening its application programming interface (API) to third-party developers. But you can bet your bottom dollar that’s something that Xiaonei and its competitors are all working on this very minute.