MySpace will open platform to external developers
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Social networking giant MySpace will open its platform to outside application developers,&#160;a move that was made months ago by its close competitor Facebook&#160;and helped boost its popularity.Chris DeWolfe, MySpace&#39;s CEO, made the announcement during an appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.The first step in opening the platform will be the creation in the next week or two of a catalog of existing widgets from third-parties that MySpace has allowed on its social network for the past four years.Then MySpace will open its platform broadly to outside developers at some point in the coming months, said DeWolfe.MySpace will have a &quot;sandbox&quot; where applications will be given test-drives by a portion of its members, to make sure the applications are safe and secure, before they are deployed to all users, DeWolfe said.However, DeWolfe said that the overall intention is to make it easy to incorporate the applications into MySpace. &quot;The idea is that, at the end of the day, most of these applications will come to MySpace,&quot; he said.MySpace will also let developers generate advertising revenue from the applications they build for the site, he said.Since opening its platform to external developers in May, Facebook has built up a catalog of about 6,000 applications, which it credits with increasing its members&#39; engagement on the site and their enjoyment of it.Facebook&#39;s popularity has grown very quickly this year, as the site has grown to 47 million active users today from 12 million in December, according to company statistics. Over half of its active members return to the site daily.In June, MySpace had 114.1 million unique visitors worldwide, up 72 percent from the same month last year, according to comScore Networks. Meanwhile, Facebook had 52.2 million unique visitors in June, up 270 percent from June 2006, according to comScore.Until now, MySpace has granted access to its platform on a case-by-case basis to developers that request it, but it doesn&#39;t have open APIs (application programming interfaces), a source of much criticism for the company in this Web 2.0 age when mashing up applications has become so popular.DeWolfe shared the stage with Rupert Murdoch, CEO of MySpace&#39;s parent company News Corp., and both answered questions from conference chair John Battelle and from audience members.With some people putting Facebook&#39;s value at around $15 billion, Murdoch was asked how much he thought MySpace would be worth and whether he would consider &quot;unlocking&quot; that value by selling the company or taking it public. Murdoch said nothing of the sort is being considered for MySpace.The Web 2.0 Summit ends on Friday.
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MySpace Wednesday will begin letting programmers pre-register for its developer platform program, which will open for business next week.Interested developers will be able to sign up on the site to receive information about the MySpace Developer Platform, announced in October. Then next Tuesday, the developer site will become fully operational and feature documentation and API tools to build and test applications for MySpace, the world&#39;s most popular social networking service.Although over the years MySpace has allowed, on a case-by-case basis, some external developers to put their widgets on the social networking site, the upcoming program potentially&#160;opens the door to any coder&#160;by providing open APIs and makes it possible for developers to generate revenue from those applications.&quot;This gives developers deeper access to our community through APIs so they&#39;ll be able to build richer applications and also gives them an opportunity to build their business directly on MySpace. It&#39;s a natural step in the evolution of how we&#39;ve worked with third party developers,&quot; said Amit Kapur, who has just been appointed chief operating officer after being in charge of business development for several years.In October, the move was widely seen as a competitive response to rival&#160;Facebook&#39;s successful opening of its platform&#160;to outside developers in May, which has resulted in the creation of about 14,000 applications and widgets for that social networking site.Other social networking companies have also followed suit and decided to let external developers create applications for their sites. Moreover, in November, Google launched its&#160;OpenSocial initiative to promote industry-wide adoption of common APIs for social applications, so that developers can more easily port their applications to different sites. MySpace, along with others, has indicated it supports OpenSocial.As it gears up for the launch of the application development platform, MySpace has taken special care to put safeguards in place to prevent security and privacy breaches from third-party applications, Kapur said.&quot;A key interest we have as we launch this platform is to protect the user experience against things like application spam and security holes, so that&#39;ll be a major part of our launch. We&#39;re extremely committed to safety and security,&quot; he said.Facebook has been dealing with this problem, as some over-eager developers have built self-promotion features into their applications to spur their adoption. Since its platform launch, Facebook has tweaked its tools and APIs several times to address the problem of applications that annoy users with intrusive displays and unsolicited messages, and seems to have the issue well under control now.&#160;
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Scores of vendors are now in the &quot;white-label&quot; social networking platform business, according to a running tally by a Forrester Research analyst.Instead of a proprietary platform like LinkedIn or Facebook,&#160;such companies offer a framework to enterprises or individuals wishing to build an online community tailored to their tastes and needs. The platforms are being used for everything from marketing and branding to internal enterprise use.It&#39;s hard not to let out a low whistle when you scan this post at analyst Jeremiah Owyang&#39;s blog.&quot;Yup, I&#39;m the analyst focused on this space, and not even I can keep up with the many vendors,&quot; Owyang said via e-mail.&quot;The flood in this market is due to low barriers to entry from easy-to-deploy software, an influx of venture money wanting to get in on the &#39;so-net&#39; action and media frenzy from existing social networks like Facebook, MySpace and others,&quot; he said.This particular bubble could soon contract, Owyang suggested. &quot;Like the [content management system] industry in the late &#39;90s, expect to see some major acquisitions from major [enterprise resource planning], media, and Web companies ... traditional CMS vendors are currently adding &#39;social features&#39; to their products -- most without success -- and will resort to acquiring vendors to fill their suites.&quot;Surviving companies will become marketing partners for enterprises, not just software providers, he predicted. &quot;Let&#39;s not discount technology completely, it can be an edge, but the ones that will stand out will have a full solution,&quot; he said.Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, said Owyang has a point.A successful social-networking site &quot;has very little to do with technology,&quot; he said, and &quot;more to do with how you program and nurture a successful community.&quot;The company wrote a white paper, &quot;Nine Steps to a Successful Online Community,&quot; that spends only a limited amount of time talking about technology.Like other companies, KickApps&#39; hosted platform is set up to let customers handle customizations. &quot;We need to have a scalable business on a self-service basis,&quot; Blum said. &quot;If we relied on going out and talking to every one of our customers, it wouldn&#39;t work. It doesn&#39;t scale.&quot;However, KickApps offers tools that run the gamut from a simple-to-use editor for adjusting look and feel, to more robust developer APIs. The company claims that about 14,000 sites have been built with its platform.In contrast to the relatively new KickApps, which started up in 2005, Sparta Social Networks is a veteran in the space, having formed in 1999.That seasoning will help the company as the category contracts, said its CEO, Jerry Sheer. &quot;We&#39;ve got eight years behind us. We understand the space more than these new players.&quot;The company is also banking on its J2EE-based platform, which is ideal for large enterprises, Sheer said.Sparta will apply advanced analytics and metrics to derive meaning from social networking data. &quot;We&#39;re going to do some very interesting things,&quot; Sheer said, adding that a social network is essentially a &quot;focus group on steroids.&quot;That strategy ties into a trend Owyang sees: companies offering &quot;insight, intelligence and data&quot; about online communities. There&#39;s yet another related category as well, the analyst notes: firms pushing Web collaboration offerings.From the wide range of choices, G-Unit Records picked Ning, a company formed by Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen. Ning targets both consumers and businesses with its hosted offering.Chris &quot;Broadway&quot; Romero, who oversees digital media at G-Unit Records, said Ning was the right platform for rap star 50 Cent&#39;s social networking site, citing its ability to &quot;stand in the background.&quot;&quot;Unless you&#39;re an administrator, you don&#39;t have to see their name too much,&quot; he said.Romero said Ning &quot;could run a little faster,&quot; but mused, &quot;Every time you add someone with the power of 50 Cent, it&#39;s going to bend the walls of any system out there.&quot;Seventy-five thousand people are members of the site, according to Romero. That growth was driven by person-to-person referrals, not traditional advertising, he said. &quot;It&#39;s definitely the way of the future,&quot; he said of social networking as a marketing tool. &quot;Everyone should do it.&quot;It may not matter much if enterprises find themselves with fewer offerings to choose from down the road, he suggested: &quot;It&#39;s more about the person&#39;s vision than the tools, most of the time.&quot;
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MySpace announced today that through a partnership with Oberon Media, it will add a section of free, multiplayer games to the popular social networking site. Casual games are turning into a huge industry, with growth expected to double to over $500 million in revenue this year.
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Social  networking Web sites have fired up industry deal headlines the  past couple of years -- from News Corp.&#39;s ground-breaking  acquisition of MySpace to the recent purchases by the Walt  Disney Co. and Viacom Inc.&#39;s Logo network of Club Penguin and  DowneLink.com, respectively.
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(InfoWorld) - Many Web developers these days feel a sleep-depriving mix of unbridled enthusiasm and nagging concern over Facebook's social-networking platform. Opened to external developers three months ago, the Facebook platform and tools are well designed and offer developers generous revenue opportunities rare among social networks, along with a fast-growing and deeply engaged community of people. However, this paradise is already getting soiled by developers who, eager to spur the adoption of their applications, design them with self-promotion features that many say are deceitful and trigger annoying and abusive actions,Â such asÂ bulk unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays. Although Facebook has acknowledged the problems and in recent weeksÂ outlined corrective measures, it's critical for the company to quickly tighten its rules and unleash stricter penalties, developers say. "It's definitely a problem that needs to be solved. There are additional steps Facebook could and should take," said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike, which rebuilt its music-discovery site within Facebook in May. As things stand now, the situation is a cat-and-mouse game, with developers seeking and exploiting loopholes in its terms of service and the company plugging them after the fact, he said. By then, however, the damage is done, and the developer who exploited the loophole boosted adoption of his application, to the detriment of competitors who respect the terms' spirit, Partovi said. That prompts honest developers to look for the next loophole as a defensive competitive measure. "That creates an unnecessarily bad environment," he said. "If the rules were simply enforced with clearer penalties, these companies would all fall into line quickly." Partovi said his company has been watching this situation from the sidelines, because, in its category, iLike has a dominant position and feels little competitive pressure. But he sympathizes with developers embroiled in competition with each other. "When you see your direct competitor exploiting a loophole and growing very rapidly and beating you, it's hard to resist the temptation," he said. "To some extent the blame is on Facebook." This comes from someone who otherwise couldn't be happier with the Facebook platform and with the effect it has had on his company. In just three months, the iLike Facebook application has close to 7 million users, almost twice as many as on the company's own Web site, leading to a doubling of the company's revenue, Partovi said. Unlike other social-networking sites, which limit the revenue-generating capabilities of external applications, Facebook has a policy widely considered generous, letting development companies run ads and engage in other commercial activities. This has contributed greatly to the attractiveness of the platform for developers. At press time, Facebook's directory showedÂ more thanÂ 3,500 applications built for the site by outside developers. "The monetization is one of the most unique things they are doing," said Tim O'Shaughnessy, a co-founder and partner at Hungry Machine, which has developed about 15 Facebook applications. "That's what's causing the fervor over the application development. People are looking at the potential to enhance their business. It's not just a distribution play. It can put real dollars in your pocket." Joseph Aigboboh, co-founder of J-Squared Media,Â another Facebook developer, agreed. "Facebook has created an opportunity to build literally any product and spread it virally to achieve unprecedented rates of growth and retention. This means that with a relatively cheap budget, companies can build lucrative products and services [and] drive revenue," he wrote in an e-mail. It's no surprise then that some developers have been overeager in their attempts to boost adoption of their applications and generate revenue, while looking for ways to bend the rules. This week, Dave Morin, Facebook's senior platform manager, addressed the concerns about annoying and abusive applications in an official blog posting, and announcedÂ steps have already been taken, with more coming. Facebook wants the popularity of applications determined by how useful and entertaining they are. Thus, it's shifting how it measures application popularity in its applications directory away from total users and toward user engagement, he wrote. Vowing to protect members' experiences on the site, he said the latest release of the Facebook Markup Language -- version 1.1 -- changes how profile boxes display content, removing applications' ability to display profile content to visitors and hide it from profile owners. The company is also limiting applications' ability to contact members to crack down on spamming of deceptive and misleading notifications. Facebook's user experience has traditionally been considered significantly more elegant, controlled, and organized than the one from key rival and social-networking leader MySpace. Although MySpace remains more popular, Facebook has been gaining momentum for the past 12 months. Its user ranks have ballooned to 37 million active users today from 12 million in December.Â More thanÂ half of its active members return to the site daily. A company called Slide, which creates "widget" applications for social-networking sites and is big on MySpace, jumped on the chance to set up shop on Facebook, which has quickly become one of its most important platforms. Although Slide has created some of the most popular Facebook applications, its detractors have criticized it for engaging in some of the inappropriate tactics flagged by Morin. But Slide's CFO Kevin Freedman said that Slide is as interested as anyone else in providing a good user experience on Facebook and elsewhere. "We listen to our users' feedback first and foremost. Regarding some of those [critical] comments, we haven't necessarily seen the same response from our users and that's really what drives us," Freedman said. Chris Kirkland, CEO of MrKirkland.com, a Web design and development firm, has created three applications for Facebook, but has been unimpressed with the developer program. "I very much consider Facebook to be 'learning on the job' with the development platform," Kirkland wrote in an e-mail. The tools and resources Facebook provides to developers could be better, he wrote. "Overall we have been extremely disappointed. The documentation is reasonable, though sometimes inaccurate, but by far our main complaint is the diabolically poor level of communication. We have a feeling that we are dealing with a bunch of overbusy college kids," Kirkland wrote. He blames this lack of communication for a situation that led Facebook to yank one of his company's applications from the site with, he says, nary an explanation and, in his view, without justification. The application, designed to let members track visits to their profiles, received initial approval from Facebook, but then the company turned around and banned it because it lacked a feature Kirkland says they never told him would be required. He's fuming that a similar application from a competitor continues on the site. "We were given no opportunity to alter the application, no warnings that they would do this, and my attempts at discussing the erroneous TOS reports with Facebook merely received generic replies," he wrote. Aigboboh, of J-Squared Media,Â also sees room for improvement in communicating with developers. "The main issue we see is that Facebook doesn't allow its developer community to interact with Facebook itself very well," he wrote, adding that he suspects Facebook is aware of this and working to correct it. On a related matter, Hungry Machine's O'Shaughnessy, echoing others interviewed, said Facebook could also do a better job of giving developers advance notice of changes on the platform back end that require applications to be adjusted. Ultimately, most developers interviewed said they hope Facebook will rein in the overeager developers and smooth the other wrinkles in the program. "The platform is still very young. As it matures, it'll get more robust and problems we experience today will start to go away," O'Shaughnessy says. "For the stage at which the platform is, we're pretty happy with it." "The people behind the Facebook platform are very smart. I'm confident they will take more steps to improve this," iLike's Partovi said. "It's like the Wild West now, but I don't think [the abuses] will last very long." Facebook didn't respond to several requests seeking comment for this story.
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Flock Inc. has added support for the MySpace social network to its Mozilla-based social Web browser.
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MySpace plans to open up its platform in the coming months, following similar moves by competitor Facebook in an effort to continue growing the site's user base.
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MySpace next week will begin providing APIs to developers looking to create applications to run on the social networking site.
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Users of the MySpace.com social networking Website will be able to add multiplayer games to their personal profile pages, and play them for free, from next year. MySpace has struck a deal with Oberon Media Inc. to make available hundreds of casual games from its portfolio, the companies said Tuesday.
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Bebo has developed a system to let applications written for Facebook run on its social network.
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Direct selling to cut out record companies MySpace is to start selling some of its music content, the Murdoch-owned social networking site said on Friday.â¦
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By Alan Sipress and Sam Diaz, Washington Post Staff Writers  Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking the unusual step of allowing the public to develop features for the popular social-networking Web site, permitting any software designer to access the company's millions of members.
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Social networking website MySpace is to allow unsigned bands to sell their music as downloads.
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It&#039;s only natural for companies large and small to want to capture some of the social-networking magic of MySpace.com, a Web site that has risen out of nowhere to become the Internet&#039;s second busiest by successfully figuring out what teens and young adults want.
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Social-networking site to unveil a set of developer tools for potentially converting existing Facebook applications.
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Today Terry Heaton posted about how inside sources have tipped him off about MySpace making a social news play, fortifying them as more of an informational and 2.0 oriented portal and hopefully bringing about some maturity to MySpace. Of course, and despite what loyal Digg users may tell you, this is no &#8220;We want to be [...]