The Facebook Platform has been one of the key things in bringing Facebook to the social networking map (admittedly, it’s one of the things that made me become a member). Its ongoing success continues to leave MySpace in the dust, so what are they going to do about it? As Financial Times reported today, they’re going to follow Facebook — with a similar platform for third-party developers.
Chris DeWolfe, one of MySpace’s founders, claims this will act a strategic change for MySpace. In the next few months, we’re likely to see an official platform which lets developers and third-party companies to ‘plug’ their application into MySpace.
While developers have been able to create Flash-based widgets and let users embed them into their profiles, it’s been somewhat artificial and forced. DeWolfe claims this gives users mostly the same benefits, “but we’ll probably end up offering a choice of both.”
Opinion
From the perspective of MySpace, their users, and the whole Internet in general, this is an excellent change. As new platforms as such emerge, it opens up new doors for application developers and startups. We’ve been seeing a lot of cool stuff already, and there’s no doubt that it’s going to increase as access to users becomes a less of a problem than creating something they’ll want to use.
