MySpace Announces Plans of Opening to Developers
October 23, 2007
Social networking giant MySpace announced last Wednesday that it will soon allow third party developers to take advantage of its service to develop widgets and applications in an effort to counter Facebook’s recent growth. The announcement was made by News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch and MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco.
The announcement is not surprising to many, considering how many users Facebook has acquired compared to MySpace over the past year. While MySpace has had to reduce its original prediction in yearly earnings by over 6%, Facebook has surged into second place position within the world of social networking with investors estimating Facebook’s value to be as much as $15 billion.
Many third party developers have been creating external Flash objects and other applications that can be embedded into the site. However, these applications could only make use of data already available to the public. With the changes being introduced in the upcoming months, developers will have the opportunity to tightly integrate their applications into MySpace.
Not only will developers have the opportunity to control key aspects of how features like photos or user authentication work, but MySpace will also allow them full control over advertising that runs on the Web pages they create to host new services on MySpace. According to DeWolfe, “There is going to be paid revenue opportunities for all the developers.”
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If Myspace hadn’t of done this, Facebook would have eventually overtaken them. I imagine this is frustrating news for Facebook, but I doubt they hadn’t been expecting it.
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