Myspace Platform: A First Comparison to the Facebook platform. Myspace just opned their platform to the developer community about 12 hours. We have been poking around the platform and have found a few items that are worthy to note when considering if you should have an application for your brand in myspace also. “Widgets” have been allowed on myspace since the very earliest days. The big difference now with the platform becoming open to developers is that now you can create more robust applications that have better functionality and connections than a “widget”. You can now have canvas pages as well.

The MySpace Developer Platform is a combination of services that provides third party application developers with hooks into MySpace’s data and functionality. These services include:

* A suite of online tools for creating and publishing applications (and debugging them).set of RESTful APIs (provided in json, xml, and other formats as needed) that provide endpoints for browser-to-site and site-to-site interaction. These are implemented over the http protocol using a simple, intuitive uri scheme.
* A mechanism for your application to exchange data with your own site.
* A system for end users to find and install applications on their profiles.
* Security mechanisms for protecting end users’ identity, as well as communications verification between MySpace servers and your site.

In short, the MySpace Developer Platform allows you to create stable, secure applications that (if you add the magic sauce) entertain MySpace users and allow them to explore the “social graph” (sound familiar?) in new and interesting ways. It also enables you to integrate your own site’s functionality into MySpace.

They have some nice sandboxes to test your app development. They have embraced the Google Open Social “quasi-standard”. More details from Myspace here.

This is the application about page on myspace. notice it has a comments area and you can see friends and also everyone that has the app installed.

Stuff that isn’t Implemented (yet). Which is a really a big deal.
Navigating between Profile and Canvas Panels: This does not currently work. When it does, you will call a function “requestNavigateTo()” to make your way between profile and canvas pages.

Activities and App Data: App Data is a way for your app to store data.
Activities are ways for your app to notify users of events that have occurred

Myspace has a developer forums area and there is some good activity/discussions already happening there.

Myspace needs to add a WIKI (like facebooks) so that there can be structure for easy dissemination & discovery of information that allows code snippets.

You need to create an account with a unique email for every app (this is very stupid and impractical). Myspace needs to allow developers to have multiple apps in development and to choose who else can see the app (other development team members)

All in all it is about what you would expect on the first day of platform launch. Needs lot’s of work; but it is a nice step in the right direction for sure.

So how does the myspace platform compare to facebook? At this time i would say that they are a bit less than what facebook launched with… but we will keep you posted. I get this feeling that we have just witnessed the birth of a whole new platform that many companies will want to embrace due to it’s new found functionality.

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