Archive notice: This article was originally published on January 31, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The social-networking platform MySpace is opening up to external developers. Based on Google’s OpenSocial interface, games, multimedia functions and other applications can be integrated into the portal in future. As the Wall Street Journal reports, MySpace is thereby following its competitor Facebook, which opened its platform to developers last spring. Since then, the music site iLike.com and photo portal Silde, for example, have been able to share significantly in Facebook’s success. In return, the additional functions also brought an increase in popularity for the social network, although the platform still lags behind MySpace in terms of user numbers.
The MySpace developer platform is officially scheduled to launch next Tuesday as part of a workshop in San Francisco. Initially, developers will be able to work with all the available tools and test programs, but not yet integrate them directly into the networking site. The company has not yet announced when this will actually happen. Until now, however, it has already been possible to post interactive applications – so-called widgets – on MySpace. The photo site Photobucket, for example, achieved great recognition and was ultimately acquired by MySpace’s parent company News Corp.
By integrating the small programs, the social network wants to become even more varied in future and hold its own better – particularly in the USA – against the increasingly strong competitor Facebook. According to Amit Kapur, MySpace’s new Managing Director, developers are also to be given the opportunity to share in advertising revenue. However, he gave no details of the proportions in which the money would be divided. To clarify copyright issues from the outset, MySpace established various guidelines and procedures for developers. These are intended to rule out disputes such as the one about the Scrabble game on Facebook.
