MySpace App Platform

Yikes the knives are out and Signor MySpace had better watch out for the stiletto of spam at it’s throat.

Via Read/Write and Techcrunch we learn that MySpace is set to launch a 3rd party developer platform. Given their track record of blocking widgets on personal pages we can all sleep soundly knowing Facebook will live to see another day. ‘Bring on the virtual poop.’ goes the battle cry from the turrets of Castle Zukerberg.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write makes some very good points, notably that Facebook has not garnered such rapid user numbers just by opening up it’s platform.

‘I have said before and I’ll say again that the rise of Facebook has been in spite of the opening of the Facebook platform, if anything. It’s a result of the maturing demographics of social networking services, a backlash against the wretched user experience of the poorly designed and spam ridden MySpace and the power of syndication represented by the Facebook wall.’

Boo hiss MySpace you were born ugly and you stayed ugly and then you let all you’re really annoying friends in to try and flog us boob job porn. As a user interface MySpace sucks and Facebook has managed to maintain a visual clarity despite the clamor to add more apps from your friends of friends (please God, no more ‘let’s share Movies’ requests, I’m getting punchy here).

Marshall continues:

‘… the vast majority of apps developed for the much-vaunted Facebook platform - including the most successful ones, are vapid wastes of time… It’s the newsfeed, clean site and well designed user experience of Facebook that really matters - and perhaps privacy. ‘

Following on from Om Malik’s keynote at FOWA last week we’ve yet to see the disruptive apps on Facebook, we’re still in the quick fix, cheap thrills cycle, let it run it’s course then seek to innovate in this space, make your app portable to any network or desktop, when the virtual poop has been virtually scooped we’ll see some exciting developments and real business models emerge in this space.

As Seth Goldstein says on his blog for SocialMedia:

‘Netscape browsed the Web, Yahoo organized it, Google searched it, and now Facebook has made it social.’

Whilst Seth sees ‘appvertising’ as more about personalized ad delivery, I see it as more about creating portable branded entertainment. Start to ask ‘what can brands do for people?’ rather than ‘what should we tell people about our brand?’. When you have the answer let them take it onto their Facebook profile or their iPhone and let them share it.

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