On Wednesday night I attended the launch for the MySpace developer platform. I was asked to create a simple application for the platform that gets the current users local postcode and retrieves from truelocal a list of businesses in the area according to five categories (Café’s & Restaurants, Clubs, Hairdressers, Bars & Pubs, Take Away Food). I then used jQuery to display the results in an accordion. All in all a fun learning experience and i’ve put together five points about why YOU should be thinking about writing apps for MySpace!
1. MySpace provides an easy to use JavaScript library that implements the OpenSocial API which makes it easy to read in a users data.
2. Porting an application written for MySpace to other social networking sites that follow the OpenSocial API should be a fairly trivial task.
3. They have a great online community of developers at http://developer.myspace.com
4. A rich REST API for server to server calls
5. At the moment the interface is quite young and undergoing rapid changes but in the future will allow for applications to tap deep into a users social graph.
Here are three things to be wary of when looking to develop MySpace Open Social apps.
1. Access to the full set of Open Social calls are only half implemented and interacting with a users friend network isn’t implemented.
2. Developing can be time consuming as a developer cannot test applications locally, they have to copy and paste the code into a web form and then submit it.
3. Access to popular JavaScript libraries will soon be limited once they implement “caja” (pronounced caha) a Google spec that attempts to make third party JavaScript safely interact with a clients browser when embedded into a site. Although MySpace does promise access to the most popular libraries via a white list when creating an application so things shouldn’t be that bad.
Posted by Drew 
Amnesia Blog 