MySpace chief executive officer Chris DeWolfe announced on Wednesday that MySpace would be opening its API to third party developers, a direct response to Facebook’s API plans. “Within the next week or two, we’re going to be developing a catalog of widgets that are on MySpace that will make it really easy to categorize and find those widgets,” DeWolfe said. “The second thing we’re doing is that we are opening up a platform within the next couple of months to all developers. You heard it here first.” –PC Magazine Article
Personally, although I think it’s great that MySpace is finally opening it’s doors, I can’t help but feel that it’s a desperate attempt in fear of losing additional market share to the far superior Facebook. I never got what the big deal about MySpace was relative to other social media networks. The design is horrible, it’s cluttered with SPAM, and above all, it just looks so “amateur”. My only logical explanation for the masses that still use MySpace, is that they are used to using it and don’t want to switch unless their entire networks switch. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see what kind of widgets start to appear. Will successful Facebook widgets (that made millions) simply be copied onto MySpace? I wonder what the the “code” copyright implications are in that case?
