News: myspace developer platform

News:
13-03-2008:
Hey I'm a guitar player, what this do for me?... I hear you ask... well it could me more things to attract your fans and ways to sell or promote product...don't know what I mean... well read about Splash cast and what they have planned for MySpace.

Mashable note:

MySpace has just announced the launch of their developer platform, meaning that beginning Tuesday morning you will be able to start building applications for what remains the most popular social network in the world. However, perhaps the most notable part of the launch is that there will not be any applications available for user’s to play with just yet.

Instead, the idea here is that all developers will get a fair shot at gaining popularity once the platform goes live next month, in contrast to Facebook, where platform launch partners such as Slide, RockYou, and iLike gained a tremendous advantage by having their applications available before everyone else got a chance to build apps.

welcome devs

So, what’s launching Tuesday is MySpace’s developer site (developer.myspace.com), which will include documentation, sample code, a developer sandbox, forums, and blogs from the platform development team, including Aber Whitcomb (CTO) and Allen Hurff (VP Engineering).

What’s in the API?

Moving beyond the launch strategy, MySpace is initially announcing three sets of APIs:

OpenSocial with MySpace Extensions: As noted in our prior coverage, the MySpace Developer Platform will be utilizing OpenSocial from day one. In a conversation earlier this evening with Jim Benedetto, SVP Technology at MySpace, it was noted that MySpace’s platform will enable standard JavaScript and HTML, versus the somewhat proprietary (though not especially complex) FBML format used by Facebook.

Action Scripts: With widgets currently being the popular way for users to customize their MySpace profiles, the development platform is offering action scripts. As a simple example, this would allow widgets to access MySpace data such as your friends list and photos, which could then be applied to a slide show widget.

REST API: This will allow for quicker communication between MySpace data and a third-party site. As an example, Benedetto says this would allow you to do something like dynamically pull in your movie recommendations from a site like Flixster and interface those with MySpace user data.

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