MySpace has softly launched their app directory to the public today, but I’m not seeing intense interest from developers. Most are so tied up in developing for Facebook and don’t want to get distracted by a buggy platform. That being said, there are over 160 million reasons why the MySpace platform will eventually work, with or without OpenSocial. There are simply too many users to ignore.
We’ve ported SocialMedia’s application tracker, Appsaholic, over to the MySpace platform and will have some stats coming out soon. However, I’m not expecting anything that amazing over the next couple of weeks. MySpace will be spinning up a lot slower compared to Facebook’s platform, which launched, crashed, and later saw explosive user growth for applications like iLike.
I’m not expecting as much because of a few reasons: OpenSocial is still buggy, MySpace isn’t good at courting developers, and MySpace has some legacy issues.
From what I’ve heard, OpenSocial is a pain to work with. Although porting our own application (Appsaholic) has been a breeze (no social interaction), other developers have had considerable trouble. I’ve heard Causes doesn’t feel they are able to move as fast on the platform despite having their best Javascript junkies hard at work on porting the application. Facebook’s standards (FBML, FQL) also closely followed familiar standards.
MySpace has always been bad at talking to developers. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the valley, it’s that developer’s chief motivation isn’t money, that’s about number two or three down the list. Developers, like entrepreneurs, are aspirational. They believe that money will follow a good product. MySpace has been pushing a focus on money instead of technology from the start and are seen as lagging behind the weekly updates to the FB platform. That’s way more exciting to developers.
Finally MySpace has a legacy problem. A lot of users have already added widgets of one sort or another via cut and paste on MySpace. It’s going to take some time for users to see the additional value of adding applications if they already have widgets on their profile.
I think any success story attached to MySpace’s platform will be more of a statement of Google’s ability to execute rather than MySpace’s. Despite pushing a rhetoric of one size fits all, Google still has a long way to go in making the platform plug and play. Individual platforms can turn on and off portions of OpenSocial, meaning that there is a de facto customization required anyhow. I’ll hold my overall judgment for another month, then we’ll know how far they’re getting.
