We are not a big fan of Los Angeles based social network king, Myspace.  Sure they helped take the social network world to the mainstream and are now the incumbent player in the space, but in the fast paced tech world, they are (at least from an innovation perspective) constantly being surpassed by upstarts as well as their key competitor: Facebook. But yesterday, Myspace finally made some huge strides to regain some confidence, by releasing their developer API.  


While the results of the Myspace development platform to consumers won't be available until the first of March, developers can now get a head start building widgets and apps for the social network.  This of course is great news for both consumers who will get all kinds of cool extensions to their social graph (ala facebook apps), and also great for developers who will likely be able to build a whole ecosystem of easy to make apps with a giant user base ready to get their hands on them.  

While Myspace is late to the game in terms of opening up their platform, they seem to be doing a few things better then Facebook's earlier API release.  For one thing Myspace is basically building their API over the top of Google's Open Social, meaning that developers can fairly easily port their apps between most social network platforms.  This increased interoperability is not only a show of good faith, but also means more developers are likely to contribute, which is obviously good for everyone involved.  Besides OpenSocial, the other thing that Myspace seems to have a better leg on is helping developers monetize their apps.  Facebook is basically hands off in this case, and more then a few developers have made high trafficked apps that have return very little money for their efforts.  Myspace seems to have an eye to help developers out in this area, which again is good for everyone involved. 

Overall it seems Myspace is doing many things right with this move.  It'll be interesting to see how things go with the full consumer release next month.