MySpace Platform Launch (London)

I was at the London launch of the MySpace platform launch party yesterday evening, with MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb, Senior president of Technology Jim Benedetto, and Country Manager for the UK Anthony Lukom, among others from the MySpace Team. 

It was a good event, with an introduction into the platform, a quick look at the basic set of APIs available and how it would work for developers, then it was mainly down to individual chats and questions to the team. One of the interesting features of the MySpace platform is the additional application space, on the users private homepage. This will make certain features much simpler and easier for users, for example notifications, RSS feeds, instant messaging etc, which at the moment (on Facebook and Bebo) must really be done through the canvas pages to be effective. They also confirmed that flash will work fine on profile boxes, which is a step ahead of Facebook and may allow for some more interesting features. 

They also verified that there would be NO manual authorisation of applications, and no value test (although all applications will automatically go through something called CAJA to check Javascript and remove any dangerous code).  

I had a really good chat with Allen Hurff, VP of Engineering, about the platform in general and some specifics. We discussed the >18 and >21 FBML tags recently introduced by Facebook, which is really relevant to some of our clients who don't want to get caught up in engaging with users too young for their services, and Allen confirmed that all applications on the MySpace platform will be able to be tagged as >16 >18 or >21. Despite some peoples claims that this is going to lead to porn (which is against the terms of service of these platforms anyway, duh), these are very useful for brands who target older consumers, for example the drinks industry, who don't want to be seen to be encouraging young drinkers, and of course the social networks themselves who don't want to be seen to be helping this. 

The Flock team were there showing off their 'social web browser', complete with MySpace integration. This looked very, very cool - the social side bar shows whatever social sites you've logged into, and has your friend list there with latest updates at the top, your status updates which you can change through the side bar, and this works automatically once you log in to a site. It also works for Twitter, Flickr etc. One of the very cool features is the easy media sharing and browsing - for example, you can load up all of a friends photos and media into a 'top bar', browse and share this with other people or services, and if you see media you like you can simply drag this onto a friend's photo and it will automatically write the html, links etc into a message to that person on whatever service. 

It will be interesting to see if they add application support at somepoint, so that users can use social network applications straight through the browser. We'll see! 

I'm going to be downloading it and giving it a try, I think it's a great idea and if it increases social network usage all the better for us social media hacks!