MySpace Opens Platform

Fox-owned social networking site MySpace today used the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco to confirm that it was opening its platform to developers. While the company has almost always allowed users to add new components to their profile pages by pasting HTML snippets, the upcoming change should allow the creation of programs that work with the MySpace infrastructure itself and can be easily added by a user to their existing profile. This would admittedly be similar to Facebook, according to MySpace, but would include better integration with ads and other revenue sources to provide a strong source of income for app developers.

Testing is set to begin soon with a group of about 2 million users who will try early programs to gauge how well they work and to make sure there are no significant security issues before launch. Programmers should have access to development tools within the next two months, MySpace said.

The expansion reflects an increasing shift towards developing programs strictly for the web, where access is more dependent on a browser's standards support than writing for a particular operating system.

By Electronista Staff