So apparently, Myspace are about to open up to 3rd party developers – in none-geek-speak, that means there’ll be lots of apps available for it like there are for facebook, written by outside developers.
They REALLY should have done this years ago. Many many years ago. Here’s why – there is now a huge industry around writing software that spams MySpace – people writing pay-to-use scripts that send out messages to people based on search terms, location or just randomly spamming everyone. A lot of developers have made a lot of money writing this pernicious shit, and have made MySpace a really unpleasant website environment as a result. I seriously doubt that those developers are going to switch to writing free apps that will make money from advertising (how the apps on facebook make their money, for the most part). What they’ll do is just modify their spam-scripts to target the apps instead. So not only will you get event, friend-request, message and comment spam, you’ll get ‘my top friends’ spam and ‘my favourite books’ spam and God-knows what else spam…
And if some f-wit decides to transfer the Zombies/Werewolves/Pirates nonsense from Facebook over there, some geeks are going to get hurt…
Anyway, with their money, it’ll be interesting to see if MySpace have actually managed to turn it into some seriously creative thinking about how to counter these obvious problems… it also remains to be seen if they are going to start allowing any kind of push/pull information exchange using standard web data link up stuff, like accepting RSS feeds for cross posting blogs, and hcal feeds for gig dates… I’m suspecting not, myself…