PC WORLD -- June 8 -- After Facebook opened its platform to third-party developers in May
2007, an explosion of applications populated the Facebook directory.
But there was a problem: many home pages became jammed with spam apps.
MySpace has taken a very different approach. Jim Benedetto, MySpace's VP of
technology spoke about how
the platform has progressed since its launch.
Q: You launched the platform back in February. What has been the response from the developer community?
A: A large number of developers have embraced it, and have started using
it to build their OpenSocial applications. We're at well over a
thousand applications now.
Q: How have the applications performed?
A: Some of the largest applications have over four million installs. We really had strict rules
around exposing viral communication channels to individual
applications. Other social platforms have given developers the ability
to instruct apps to, with one click, send a message to 100 of the
user's friends. In the end users were falling for spammy apps. So we've
decided that we're going to slowly roll out some of the communication
channels on the platform.
Q: We see all these playful apps on social networks, and they are
a lot of fun. But should there be some development around applications
that help us do our jobs better?
A: As the platform matures, and as the
individual app developers learn the platform better and iterate over
their own development, I think you'll start seeing more applications
that are useful for people to do their jobs.
Q: SN were criticized as being "walled gardens"-
where you could only view data and information provided a fellow user
was on your social network. OpenSocial was viewed as a first step
towards solving that, but what else needs to be done?
A: The next step is the ability for users to take the data and content with them
outside of each individual island and each individual autonomous
website. We're releasing a set of Open
APIs and open source code that's going to allow any third party site to
implement MySpace data.
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