MySpace finally announces their developer platform launch on Feb 5th

According to both Mashable and The Social Times today, MySpace has finally announced that they’re going to be launching their own developer platform on February 5th. From Mashable:

Earlier this evening, I spoke with Amit Kapur, who the company is also announcing has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer and will oversee the platform. While MySpace may be a little late to the platform party, it’s clear that they have been closely watching developments in the space and will be addressing many of the growing pains that chief rival Facebook has dealt with from the get-go; most notably privacy, monetization, and data ownership.

And additionally:

This means that unlike Facebook, where we have dozens of ad networks competing for inventory on applications, MySpace may play an active role, presumably utilizing its large ad sales force to help developers get premium revenue.

I think that MySpace is being really smart in their approach to the platform. It’s clear they’re not the first players in this game, but they’ve really paid a lot of attention to where Facebook is fumbling, and it seems like they’ve keyed in on the issues with monetization, assuming that they can attract developers with simpler (and they hope more effective) revenue models.

That’s true in a lot of cases, but I think that development on all of these social platforms going forward—Myspace, Facebook, and Open Social—will see a rise in applications designed less to be standalone, moneymaking ventures and designed more to replace the advertising and exposure that are already trending down in TV and other traditional media.

In other words, I’m not sure that application developers going forward will be looking first to monetize their apps. It may be something that they choose to do, but I think a forward-looking platform should design tools to help maximize brand exposure.

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