VentureBeat

Yesterday, MySpace started showing off its new gallery of third-party applications that users can now start adding to their profiles and to their MySpace home pages. This gallery is the most recent of many ponderous steps that MySpace has taken in its quest to copy Facebook’s formative and market-leading developer platform.

Now, the hard part starts for MySpace: Improving the platform while it is live, keeping both users and developers happy.

I’ve been talking with a number of Facebook developers who are jumping in to build apps on MySpace. Overall, the mood is optimistic, but there are many issues.

See my interview, below, with top Facebook application developer Blake Commagere, for his take.

But first, here’s a wrap-up of the state of things.

Even now, MySpace is trying to play it safe with unleashing apps upon its users. The app gallery is not yet prominently featured on the MySpace interface. Instead, it is a sort of meet-and-greet for applications and the random MySpace users who stumble in.

A group of MySpace employees are manually approving each new app. If the app isn’t approved, it’s placed into a “suspended” state, and its developers can’t work on it. “A big part of the developer community is not happy that they’ve been unable to fix or test their apps for over a day,” one anonymous developer tells me.

More generally, the platform is still not yet fully released, and viral channels — like notifications between friends about applications — are not yet available. So applications don’t have a good way to grow. In the words of SplashCast, a company that develops widgets for musicians on MySpace (via Steve O’Hear):

The lack of fanfare for MySpace is likely due to the fact that the MySpace Platform is still very much vapor-ware. The skeleton of an API exists, but guts are missing. For Flash application developers, there is very little social graph interaction & messaging enabled at this point. It’s a bit disappointing that even after 10 months of watching and learning from Facebook, MySpace couldn’t even bring a fully-implemented product to market — much less a game-changing product. There is no leap-frogging here, folks.

So there are no apps that have really taken off, yet. A quick look at the gallery shows that since yesterday, by far the largest application is the Project Playlist app created by the music-sharing site of the same name. Around 10,000 MySpace users have installed it. The next largest application, a poker game, has a third as many users. This isn’t surprising, since MySpace has been music-centric since it first became popular with indie rock bands and their fans in LA, and has become a staple part of most musicians’ promotions efforts (our coverage).

There are other issues. Sometimes when I try to load applications, MySpace fails to add them for me. Ah, beta software! Also, some of these applications don’t seem to work in Camino, my preferred web browser.

With the platform still not fully launched, questions still remain around where the viral channels for growth actually are — it’s mostly speculation at this point. On Facebook, those channels include the Facebook news feed on users’ homepages and mini-feeds on their profiles, as well as the application itself located on their profiles, email invites, notifications that appear within the homepage and even ads that appear in other applications.

Still, there’s been continual enthusiasm for MySpace’s platform among developers because MySpace is the largest social network in the world, and so far it has only allowed far less complex widgets to live on its site (our coverage).

Dan Peguine, developer of the Honesty Box Facebook app, tells me that thousands of his users have asked him to launch the same app on MySpace. So far, more than 500 MySpace users have added it.

Despite all the problems, this platform marks a great new opportunity for third parties to grow their own businesses, the News Corp.-owned social network hopes. It promises third parties greater access to its user data, as well as more strategic placement of apps within the site than what was previously offered to widgets. Peguine tells me he’s “bullish” about the opportunities on MySpace and more generally on Open Social, the standard for building applications that can work on multiple social networks.

Here’s my interview with Commagere:

VentureBeat: You have some of the most successful applications on Facebook, so what are your thoughts on the MySpace platform so far?

Blake Commagere: It’s a very different way to architect apps, so it’s a bit of a learning curve. In Facebook, you don’t have to think about synchronicity. In MySpace, you have asynchronous requests occuring and calling callbacks.

Obviously, the fact that they launched with [version 0.7 of the platform] is huge — and as soon as they add invitation support, I think it will explode. Additionally, I thought it was very interesting that they give you space on the home page, not just the user’s profile. With my first release, I won’t be taking full advantage of that, (I’ll simply display the same thing as on their profile), but I think it’s a very, very important place to reach out to users. One constant problem I have is showing people what’s new, and I don’t want to have something that reaches out to every user in an email, or pings their newsfeed. I can put things like “new feature — xyz” contained in the zombies box [for example] on their home page. I think that will make for a really cool user experience.

VB: Don’t you think Slide and RockYou still have a big edge on MySpace because they have all those widgets installed already? What about MS widget makers who never made it big on Facebook? Do you see them having an edge here?

BC: If MySpace allows [existing MySpace widget owners] to promote their apps using their existing flash widgets, then absolutely. I don’t have insight into what MySpace is or isn’t permitting. But yeah, it won’t exactly be easy to compete with some of these huge user bases. Of course, MySpace has never permitted advertising on the profiles, so this could arguably be considered a form of advertising and not be permitted.

VB: What strikes you as the most promising viral channels on MySpace?

BC: At the moment, I believe it is profile discovery/app directory. I haven’t tried their newsfeed integration, but if that’s live, then hands down it will be the newsfeed. And once invitations are implemented, it will probably be invitations.

VB: Some Facebook app developers say profile pages are where growth happens … guess you know different ;)

BC: Ah, I’m sorry, I tend to frame things from my point of view. For my apps — communication based apps that is — it is definitely newsfeed/invitations. For self-expression apps (think slideshows, etc) it is profile discovery. Mike Sego [one of the developers of popular Facebook app (fluff)Friends] has seen a ton of growth from profile discovery. He’s a great example of that.

VB: So are you more interested in MySpace and Open Social than Facebook at this point? (Note: See my interview with Commagere last fall about his early take on Open Social.)

BC: Heh heh. I love all my children the same. Obviously, I’m spending more time on MySpace and Open Social at the moment as I have to get something live. Depending on how well my apps perform, I’ll obviously spend the most time in whichever network(s) my apps perform best. If MySpace users don’t wanna be Zombies — crazy to even think that! — then I won’t keep trying to force it on them.

Blake Commagere is a top third-party developer on Facebook, having built or worked with others to build popular applications like Causes, Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves and Slayers (he also works with startup Mogad, which is developing a sort of news feed site).

Commagere is the type of developer Google and its OpenSocial partners want working with them on their OpenSocial project. The project aims to let a single application work across multiple social networks.

We chatted with Commagere today (by IM) to try to get a developer’s view of OpenSocial’s significance.

VentureBeat: Will OpenSocial change how you spend your time? That is, will you spend less time developing for Facebook, where we saw the first gold rush? (See here and here.)

Blake Commagere: Naturally I’m going to try out OpenSocial. It certainly has the potential to turn into a gold rush. And as a developer, I love that I only have to learn one new set of APIs.

However, here are some distinct differences. Say OpenSocial allows access to post to the equivalent of a newsfeed on another social network. If the social network doesn’t have a newsfeed, an application that relies on Facebook’s news feed won’t have this news feed to help it grow.

Of course, I think every network has said they’ll do a news feed (if they haven’t already) so I imagine it’s just a matter of time before that isn’t a big deal. But the essential point is that these social networks still have to implement these features if they don’t have them. Now we can interact with the social networks. So say your app is on Bebo and doing well and now another network implements those critical features you needed, well then it’s easy to try out your app on that network.

I would imagine that as the social networks converge in features, you’ll see good results on each. Success won’t all come at once as the networks probably have different priorities.

VB: Some are concerned that Google’s leadership of the OpenSocial’s application programming interfaces will result in standards that favor Google. Are you concerned?

BC: Well, standardization doesn’t necessarily kill innovation. Google is very much a tech company that understands developers. The API they’ve created is versioned, and as companies come up with new aspects for their platform, I would think that Google would accomodate that in OpenSocial.

I would be amazed if one of these companies came up with a killer platform feature and Google refused to add it to OpenSocial in order to maintain some sort of advantage for themselves.

VB: Do you think Facebook will be able to keep some sort of competitive edge? Do you see Facebook’s design, its existing user base, or other factors helping it in the long run?

BC: I think honestly — and I know this sounds like a very diplomatic, planned answer — that Google and Facebook are both incredibly smart tech companies. And the world of social networks is huge. I’m pretty sure there will always be room for two players. Maybe one camp will have an edge over the other but it’s a huge and lucrative market. So if someone ends up in “second place” they’ll still be sitting pretty.

As a developer, I would hope that Google and Facebook work together and standardize together. Even if they don’t, they’ll both be very successful. So will I develop on OpenSocial? Absolutely. Will I continue to develop on Facebook? Absolutely.

VB: Part of the OpenSocial pitch is that you don’t have to learn a special markup language, and other specifications of an individual social network. But you’ve talked about how great Facebook’s markup language, FBML, and its query language, FQL, are.

BC: I think FBML or some variation of it is great. While FQL is powerful, I prefer not to use it. To do some things, you do need it, but if possible I try to just use FBML

Pros of FBML: Fewer API calls, the look and feel of Facebook is maintained by them, so less code. Cons: It won’t do everything you hope (yet!), but facebook’s API makes up for that - it makes for a very powerful combo.

Now why are fewer API calls so great? Well, say I want to say “Hi Eric, Welcome to my cool app”
In Facebook I don’t have to know your name to do that - I just output something like this to facebook “Hi, <fb:name uid=1234 firstonly=true />”

So all I have to deal with is your user id. Doing several API calls means more points of failure. So if I have to call your API 20 times versus two, it’s a big deal. Google realizes this and I’m sure they’ll do one of two things:

1) Design OpenSocial in a way that really does minimize the number of API calls so that this pain isn’t felt

2) Create a standard FBML-type markup that developers can use

OpenSocial is only going to get better, so I imagine that the biggest pain points may not even be what I’m anticipating. Whatever developers are going to have problems with I’m confident that Google will work to improve.

VB: If you were Facebook, would you join OpenSocial?

BC: Platforms are still a very new concept - so there will be parts that need improvement. If I were Facebook — again, this answer may come across as too diplomatic to be useful to you –I would absolutely look at it and chat with Google.

It may make sense for them to join, it may make sense for them to join later on, or never. They won’t just ignore it - they’ll of course look into it & decide if it’s in their best interest. Again, I don’t know if it’s a “join or get crushed” situation. I think the market has room for both. I think some of what I created will be successful on other networks. I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic.

VB: Specifically to you, how could you see your Facebook apps working on other social networks? Will Zombies be able to bite across networks?

BC: The cross-network functionality isn’t clear to me. I would love it if it was easy for a user to have the same zombie on all networks - because then they can play the game wherever they want

I’m not sure if OpenSocial will allow for that - if so it would rock. And someone probably already knows the answer to whether that will be allowed but I don’t know yet :)

Mogad is the latest startup building a peer-recommendation web service, similar to Facebook’s “news feed” feature.

Unlike Facebook’s closed system, however, Mogad wants to be a “news feed” for the whole web, that can give you recommendations from anything they do. For example, if you’re purchasing a book, Mogad will show you what books your friends are most interested in.

This field is a daunting one, because it’s filled with players. Plaxo’s social network, Pulse, Forbes’ newly-purchased Clipmarks and a number of other sites are working on variations of this same idea. However, Mogad says none of the existing players have provided an adequate way to securely select and invite your friends and control what they’re seeing from you.

Mogad is still in early days, and it’s almost premature to point people to its site — the company is planning a wider launch in the next couple weeks.

It hits the radar mainly because it has just received a first round of investment of half a million dollars from former Google employee Aydin Senkut, who manages Felicis Ventures, and angel investors Peter Thiel and Georges Harik.

The San Francisco-based company uses a browser plugin to collect information about what you and your friends are viewing, then it makes recommendations about things you might find interesting: articles, videos, and so on. It uses both explicit recommendations from your friends and its own software to figure out what you’ll most want to see.

See screenshots below. The plugin has two buttons: One that shows you what friends who have joined Mogad have recommended and one that allows you to send a recommendation to your friends.

For example, if you want to share a part of an article, you can select text from an article and send the text and a link to your Mogad friends.

Mogad offers a range of privacy settings so you can choose to allow only friends or yourself to see what it collects. You can also share your Mogad’ed items with the public on Mogad’s site — or turn the thing off completely if you have very private browsing to do. If need be, you can delete whatever Mogad collects from you.

The plugin is only available for Firefox now, but the company is also working on an Internet Explorer browser plugin.

The company’s founders have computer science backgrounds. One founder, Blake Commagere, a recent Plaxo employee, also developed the popular Facebook third-party applications Zombies and Vampires. Yanda Erlich used to work in product management in both Google’s advertising and consumer web products divisions.

Senkut, who has invested in a number of companies, says this is the first time he will join a company’s board.