MySpace Platform Goes Live February 5

After months of delays, MySpace will finally be launching their highly-anticipated platform for developers on February 5. The new platform, like the Facebook Platform, will be a set of APIs that will allow third party developers to create applications that will run on MySpace, with access to MySpace profile information, friend lists, friend activity, and other resources.

The applications, which will be hosted on MySpace servers, developers can include:

· Flash applets

· Javascript

· iFrame elements

The platform will be compatible with Google’s OpenSocial platforms, allowing OpenSocial apps to work on MySpace with minimal adjustments.

Perhaps most exciting for developers is the ability to host advertising on their applications – and the ability for them to keep 100 percent of the advertising revenue generated. This will attract developers and allow MySpace to catch up with Facebook, which already has more than 15,000 applications on their platform.

Stay tuned as more details are revealed.

Facebook’s apps are back in headlines following Friday’s announcement of a new JavaScript client library that will allow their applications to be displayed on any Web site – the company’s latest move to stay on par with Google’s OpenSocial.

With the new client library, users will be able to integrate social networking apps into blogs, personal home pages and other Web sites. This means that while visiting your buddy’s home page, you can throw snowballs at, vampire bite, take sexy back from or otherwise interact with your Facebook buddies.

While Facebook has already released an API for writing applications, and while some developers have already created multi-site applications, the release of this JavaScript library makes it incredibly easy for anyone to embed these applications on a number of sites.

Wei Zhu from Facebook writes:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

For more information about the library, check out: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=73