MySpace is launching its developer platform tomorrow and is going great lengths to highlight the ways it's different from the Facebook Platform. That's ironic given that the dominant reaction to the Facebook Platform, from users at least if not the press, is that it's made the site too much like MySpace.
None the less, there are some very interesting details available about the MySpace Platform. After all, that is where the action is - there's far more traffic to MySpace than Facebook.
]]> A few highlights concerning the announcement include:- The best part of the announcement, as far as I'm concerned, is that MySpace apps will be allowed to include user admin/home page interfaces in addition to the part of the app that displays on the public facing profile your friends see. It will be drag and drop, making your admin page a lot like an AJAX start page. This is a big differentiator with Facebook so far.
- Developers will have one month to work on apps for the platform before users come in. It's open to all, something MySpace says will "democratize" the process and prevent any early-access favoratism given to a handful of select companies on the Facebook Platform.
- User security is high priority and apps will be limited in their ability to access information. Some critics allege that this is not the case at all over on Facebook, saying the Platform there gives total access to any app allowed to enter your profile. That said, see our earlier post today on MySpace and Google.
- There are three APIs, the Google-lead OpenSocial being the primary one, some MySpace extensions for fields like favorite movies is another. Though we've said that OpenSocial would be better described as OpenWidget, this instance at least will support social graph portability. Notable. Note also though that this is one more platform deploying "OpenSocial - Plus." Get enough Plusses in a room together and you have to wonder how much anyone is communicating with anyone else.
- MySpace's oAuth support, via OpenSocial, will - I believe - make MySpace by far the biggest user of oAuth on the web. That's great news for this open standards based authentication protocol. More oAuth = more and safter mashups all around the web.
The least convincing reply to my questions came when I asked MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb what would keep MySpace apps from being as annoying as the ones that have lead Facebook users to complain that Facebook is now too much like MySpace. Whitcomb said that MySpace apps would be less annoying because developers would have more and equal time to develop them, this next month before users let in, and so there would be fewer trivial and poorly made apps.
Finally, I'd just like to add to this discussion that MySpace has solved the spam issue better than almost anyone else on the web. Have you noticed? At the end of September MySpace installed a Captcha requirement before a friend request could be sent and I feel like I haven't gotten a single spam request since then. That's great!
You can be snobby about your friends' noisy MySpace pages and the "classier" Facebook experience if you want, but many people are getting tired of the Facebook Platform already and it will be interesting to see what the leading social network online can do now.
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