MySpace plays "catchup" with Facebook

Stan Beer
Thursday, 18 October 2007 15:48

Your IT - Home IT

It had to happen sooner or later. MySpace, the clear leader in the social networking race, is starting to glance back over its shoulder at what its fast growing second placed rival Facebook is doing and imitate some of its rival's best features.

Coming soon to MySpace pages will be a directory of third party widgets and, more importantly, a development platform to enable the creation of dynamic third party applications for MySpace pages. If that sounds like it has already been done - it has. Facebook opened up its site to third party developers nearly six months ago.

Another area where MySpace is playing catchup is in enabling users to define different classes of contacts, which will be given different levels of access to user profiles depending on the class they belong to.

While MySpace has continued to grow, there is no doubt that the leading social network's management has watched nervously as Facebook, once a boutique social network for college students, has grown rapidly to the point where it has nearly 50 million active users, almost half the size of MySpace.

In addition, because of its college roots and more focused exposure to the educated sector of the populace, Facebook management could argue to advertisers that the site has a potentially higher value audience to market products and services to than the more general consumer oriented MySpace.

However, with an active membership of more than 100 million, MySpace should prove to be a lucrative market for third party applications developers - especially since they will be able to get advertising revenues from ads that run on pages within their applications.

The MySpace development platform is reportedly scheduled to be launched before the end of 2007.