MySpace Finally Opens The Door To Application Notifications

Tonight MySpace is preparing to launch a new addition to its application platform that allows developers to distribute notifications from their apps to their users. It may not sound particularly exciting at first, but the feature is one that developers have been clamoring for, as the notifications are essential to drive asyncronous applications (like a long-term chess games), and can be used to keep users engaged with a variety of other apps. The program is only in Beta for now (developers can only send notifications to other developers or themselves) with plans to release it more widely in the near future.

Given how basic the feature is, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen it sooner. So what took so long? MySpace says that it’s doing its best to prevent abuse from spammy applications – a problem that Facebook suffered from for a few months when it first got started (it has since employed a variety of measures to curb spam, but it isn’t perfect). Notices will be shown in their own channel on MySpace, similar to the way invites are in the site’s message center, so even if some spam does get through it shouldn’t be too annoying.

For more details, check out the MySpace blog post here.