MySpace App Dev Platform Still a Work in Progress

IDG News Service — MySpace launched its developer program more than a year ago, and the jury is still out on how successful it will end up being.

MySpace officials say they are satisfied with the amount of developer involvement with the platform, for which about 8,000 applications have been built.

"We're continuing to see great traction," said Gerardo Capiel, who was recently hired to be vice president of product management for the MySpace Open Platform.

But by contrast, external developers have built more than 52,000 applications for Facebook, which launched its platform in May 2007.

MySpace's decision to support a variety of open standards, such as OAuth, OpenID and OpenSocial, has made the process of building the platform "iterative," an approach developers have approved of, Capiel said. The OAuth protocol for user authentication, the OpenID user-identity framework and the OpenSocial set of common APIs for social-networking applications are works in progress.

The other side of that argument is that hitching its wagon to open technologies that are still very much in flux, in particular the Google-backed OpenSocial, has probably prevented MySpace from building up the platform more quickly, said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.

At the same time, MySpace hasn't done as much evangelism for its developer program and platform as other vendors have, he said.

"OpenSocial needs to ramp up momentum, and MySpace would benefit. So it's partly that MySpace hasn't taken a lot of initiative lately for developers, and also that OpenSocial itself isn't picking up steam, perhaps because it's a group effort and everybody is waiting for someone else to push the cart forward," Valdes said.

The MySpace developer program hasn't generated anywhere near the amount of enthusiasm and activity that other application platforms enjoy, such as the ones for Twitter, Palm Pre, BlackBerry and Android, Valdes said.

"I look at the MySpace application platform and I don't see nor hear that kind of conversation among developers or users," Valdes said. "There isn't this notion that there's an opportunity there and that if developers can finish their application this weekend and launch it, they'd get the gold at the end of the rainbow."

In addition, MySpace's popularity among end-users has cooled off, while usage booms elsewhere, including on Facebook and Twitter.

In March 2008, the Fox Interactive Media sites, including MySpace, had 88.3 million U.S. unique visitors, a figure that dropped to 85.1 million last month, according to comScore. In that same time period, Facebook's unique visitors in the U.S. grew from 36 million to 61.2 million. Globally, Facebook sped past MySpace last year. Currently, Facebook claims 200 million users to MySpace's 130 million.

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