We’re here at the 9:30am session and this panel is covering the MySpace Platform. This session is by Allen Hurff of MySpace.

Allen: At Foo Camp when I mentioned Open API the perception was that MySpace would likely become a walled garden. While there picked up the book RESTful Web Services. I got the concept of RESTful Web Services and when I got back I bought a number of copies and gave it to as many developers as I could.

We wanted to build an application platform but we didn’t want to make developers build on yet another app platform. We started talking with Google and around the arly Fall we started working on a co-project that is now known as OpenSocial. We launched the platform February 5th. We decided to build a huge list of what everybody wanted and we basically came up with the .5 spec. We announced a thirty day period for application developers to have a level playing field so we could try to avoid an situation where first movers had an insurmountable advantage

On the app gallery page we started sorting alphabetically, then by most installs, then by most recent. We recently added the recently popular sort which is currently the default sort. We currently have sponsored application placements located above the app directory categories, and those placements exist because we are in the business of making money. It is important to note that even as MySpace works hard to build a great relationship with the developers that effort never comes as a sacrifice to our users’ experience. With that in mind we want users to have more granular controls over how they interact with their friends and applications.

MySpace MDP has been public for 3 months and has 9000 developers that have built over 1800 applications. By building an application on MySpace you are leveraging 117 million unique users in 30 plus countries. As evidenced by Bumper Stickers’ growth you can see the effect of cross promotion.

Our future plans include:

• offer small and medium size develpers engagement metrics
• offer translations services for the 30+ countries/culture
• fully support the OpenSocial 0.8 spec
• collaborate and deploy OpenSocial Template and Markup Language
• continued development and testing of Caja
• continued development of Open Standards
• contined support of ActionScript 3 librarires which we are updating to support the .8 spec