NEW YORK - MySpace users will be able to add
games, e-mail services and other features from outside developers
without ever leaving the site under a new program the popular online
community will fully launch next month.
MySpace
already allows users to customize their personal profile pages. But
they generally must go off the site, grab the lines of programming code
they are interested in and cut and paste that into their profiles. Now,
users will be able to add those features more directly.
Under
the MySpace Developer Platform, an outside e-mail provider can write a
program that sits on the personal home page users see when they log on.
Users can check for new messages right there.
Or — instead of taking visitors to another
site to view photo albums — a photo-sharing service can write a program
that appears on a MySpace profile page that friends visit.
The
company unveiled details of the previously announced platform Tuesday
and said developers would be able to write and test interactive
programs, called "widgets," on up to five users for a month before
making them available to the broader MySpace community.
MySpace's
launch of a developer platform follows a May decision by its smaller
rival social network, Facebook, to open its platform to developers.
That has proven a boon for music-sharing startup iLike.com,
photo-sharing service Slide Inc. and other companies.
Those
applications, in turn, have helped make Facebook more popular, although
it still ranks second behind MySpace, a unit of News Corp.
By
bringing features from other sites with the developer program, MySpace
hopes users will have fewer reasons to leave the site — and view ads
elsewhere.
Amit
Kapur, MySpace's chief operating officer, said all applications would
be treated equally, even though the openness means competitors could
siphon traffic from MySpace's own products — such as the MySpaceTV
feature that competes with Google Inc.'s YouTube.
"If
somebody builds a better feature than we do, we want to see that
succeed," he said. "It's shortsighted for us to think we can do
everything."
Age,
hometown, photo albums and video clips posted on MySpace profiles will
be among the data available for incorporation into the widgets. The
company said developers would have access only to data already publicly
visible, and users can keep that information from developers by
restricting profile access to friends only.
MySpace
will let developers sell ads, sponsorships and products on special
pages assigned to each application, but no ads will appear on the
widgets themselves.
Visit:
Makai Studio
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