In what is sure to be one of the biggest social networking entrepreneurship themes of 2008, MySpace has announced that it will be opening it developer platform on February 5.

Initially announced late last year, the launch of the MySpace Platform marks a major shift in the social networking giant’s third party strategy: originally aggressive in preventing third parties from monetizing MySpace widgets and sucking out traffic, MySpace now wants to help developers monetize their MySpace Platform applications. This is great news for developers. Things have changed quickly in the last year!

The MySpace Platform will support OpenSocial from day one, with MySpace-specific enhancements layered on top. Of course, Facebook developers who have built their applications using FBML or iframes will need to change their apps to work on MySpace and other OpenSocial containers. However, I’m sure MySpace will not have a problem courting developers to test and develop the Platform.

In order for applications to experience the same kind of growth on MySpace as they did on Facebook, MySpace must give app developers access to powerful viral marketing channels, while preserving the user experience. Hopefully, MySpace can take best practices from the Facebook Platform’s first 8 months, and avoid a lot of the early issues Facebook developers and users experienced.