@Silicon Valley – “This should have happened months ago. When the competition leads with an innovative idea that gets noticed”. It’s true that MySpace is not the first SocNet to offer a platform, but it’s by no means the last – what are the 2nd and 3rd biggest social network platforms? There’s plenty of room for MySpace here, plus MySpace has benefited from seeing where the mistakes have been made in the existing platforms – such as the problem of spam generated by apps.

@William – the decision to support OpenSocial, to me, is a clear sign that MySpace is trying its best to avoid being proprietary. Yes, it’s some new API calls to learn, but the notion that you can use the skills learned on other social networks is v empowering to the developer. MySpace could have invented yet-another-markup-language, but didn’t. I’m not sure, therefore why you mention FBML as that is a very proprietary language.

@Tom – “I really don’t see anything to get excited about here. As mentioned above, developers have always been able to embed things like games and music into Myspace via Flash.” Well, firstly OpenSocial allows you access profile information for the profile viewer, owner and potentially their friends (depends on privacy setting, etc). Also, it’s MySpace giving you the clear green light to develop these apps and help you get them easily onto user’s profiles.

@Vagif “I wouldnt be surprised if it very buggy and full of security despite being based on the opensocial api. Not to mention that myspace is completely saturated with widgets already.” That’s a very pessimistic position! If anything, the security is one of the highest priorities for the MySpace platform dev team and I think it’s an area that’s going to be particularly strong in compared to the competition. As for MySpace being saturated with widgets, I’m unsure as to what you mean… Even more choice, combined with new functionality from the OpenSocial calls, means more choice for the user as to what she puts on her profile page – to me that has to be only but a good thing.

If people have questions or queries about the MySpace Developer Platform and OpenSocial please feel free to email me: bmetcalfe (at) myspace.com

Starting today, programmers can sign up to register for the MySpace API program, which will go live on February 5th….

If you’re watching this space, but are having a hard time keeping up, I publish a weekly digest every Wednesday on the Social Networking Industry, be sure to check it out.

http://www.web-...ategory/digest/

It often has links to Techcrunch, news releases and additional information from briefings with these vendors.

http://www.jhatak.com
Blazing Fast Internet Web Meetings : Free

I’m going to start creating my apps for myspace so users on Givemebeats.com can promote their beats easily

http://www.givemebeats.com

However I am a little skeptical right now because of myspace’s history of closing down a large number of useful 3rd party applications in the past. Let us see if they have really changed.

Am signing up right now, to try and see if we can integrate the data from facebook and myspace somehow.

James
from
FaceySpacey.com, Your One Stop Social Media Shop

Oh…Can any of the users of myspace export their fof info ?
Do any of you receive a penny of the ad revenue that your content generates?
I dont understand the My Space love…..

john
dishonestrealtor.com

Beyond that a platform is only valuable if it can provide relevant social information. But most people’s Myspace social graph is so corrupted at this point that it’s essentially useless. I mean, how many people do you know who have 100+ Myspace friends and don’t know the great majority of them? Or people who just add anyone? Half of why Facebook’s info is so valuable is because they go out of their way to make sure every account is an actual person and not just a fake identity. Myspace doesn’t do that.

Beyond that I suppose Myspace can offer personal info (favorite movie, tv show, etc…) but that data could easily be gotten through a crawler now so other than a little convenience nothing’s been accomplished there.
Then you have Facebook’s biggest advantage which is the newsfeed but Myspace doesn’t have an equivalent to that so they have nothing to offer there.

So beyond the laughable claims that they are going to somehow help developers monetize their applications (myspace can’t even monetize itself at this point) I don’t see anything terribly exciting here.

This should have happened months ago.

When the competition leads with an innovative idea that gets noticed – others follow

right on target. nice move Amit!
(and congrats on the promotion

guessing Facebook will be watching the story on Platform Monetization closely.

double-psyched we already had Amit lined up as a keynote speaker at Graphing Social Patterns, March 3-4 in San Diego (plug)
http://conferen...lly.com/gspwest