VentureBeat

It’s official: MySpace, seeking to defend its status as the leading social network, will open up its platform to third-party developers over the next couple of months.

The news was confirmed tonight at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, where News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch and MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe were featured guests.

Like rival Facebook’s move six months ago, MySpace’s move will let developers build applications within MySpace and make money from them.

The full significance of this move — and of social networking platforms in general — is hard to tell. Despite the hype generated lately about the Facebook platform, few of the 6,000 or so applications are remarkable or particularly innovative. On the other hand, the applications are drawing traffic: Facebook’s platform applications see 14 million unique visitors a month, with 88 million visits for an average visit time of 4:30 minutes, according to Compete. We’ve heard estimates that the applications account for anywhere between two and 20 percent of Facebook’s overall traffic, something we’ve been trying to confirm.

MySpace, which still leads Facebook in overall users by a wide margin, was expected to make the move to embrace developers — as a way to ensure its leadership position.

However, MySpace has already let users install widgets from third parties. The difference is, now these widget-makers have the opportunity to build more complete applications for their existing MySpace users. Successful Facebook application developers will also have the opportunity to push their wares to MySpace.

RockYou and Slide, the leading widget providers on MySpace and application leaders on Facebook, both said that they have been waiting hungrily to push applications across MySpace and all the other social networks that plan to offer developer platforms — such as Hi5, Bebo and Tagged.

Even though Facebook’s open-platform move instigated the development of these rival platforms, Facebook’s has been a technical work in progress, with glitches still being regularly reported by developers.

News Corp.’s MySpace is opting for a slower approach, hoping to avoid some of the same problems.

In the next couple of weeks, the company says, it will release a directory of widgets already on its site.

Then, within the next couple of months, it will launch a platform that gives developers deeper access to MySpace data. Like Facebook, MySpace will offer application programming interfaces to its user data, so developers can build applications that run within MySpace. It will offer its own markup language for designing application user interfaces, and will let developers include Flash, Javascript and iFrames elements — also similar to what Facebook already offers. MySpace users will be able to share their profile information, activity on the site, lists of friends, and other personal data with developers’ third-party applications.

Asked by an audience member if MySpace planned to be more open than Facebook, DeWolfe smiled and said, “yes.”

It will initially offer third-party applications to only a subset of around two million MySpace users.

Next up: Google, which on Nov. 5 is expected to do something similar, starting with its social network, Orkut.
Separately, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch confirmed that MySpace co-founders DeWolfe and Anderson have signed a contract to work for MySpace for two years. There’s been speculation the pair are making $30 million over that time.
Asked by interviewer John Battelle what he thought of Silicon Valley culture, Murdoch responded: “In many ways it’s the most exciting place on earth, the center of innovation.”
In response to the rumors that Facebook is possibly raising money at up to a $15 billion valuation from Microsoft, Murdoch said it would mean Newscorp is “totally underpriced.” Facebook is known to be making much money, with reports putting revenue at $150 million this year, mostly from a sweet revenue deal with Microsoft. Newscorp has a $70 billion market value and will make $5 billion if the economy holds up, Murdoch said. More coverage here.
[Mark Coker, who covered the Murdoch talk at the Web 2.0 Summit, contributed to this report.]

During Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote today, senior representatives from Microsoft and Amazon came on stage to demonstrate how they’re integrating their services with Platform. Google was nowhere to be seen. Forget the Facebook-Myspace rivalry — could an anti-Google triumvirate be forming?

Zuckerberg told us he went to Redmond several days ago to talk with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Officer, because the company has experience building “big apps.” The two companies are openly close, with Microsoft (not Google) providing contextual banner advertising for Facebook at a premium rate.

Especially after rumors earlier this week about Google and Salesforce teaming up, a Facebook-Microsoft appears mutually beneficial. The 24 million-plus active users of Facebook getting plugged in to Microsoft’s vast array of offerings. In fact, during the keynote, Microsoft’s Silicon Valley representative, Dan’l Lewin, openly discussed using integration to better serve small-to medium-sized businesses — also Google Apps’ target. Initial efforts here have already been made, with Facebook profile photos being integrated with Vista applications.

Facebook and and Amazon have also worked together to develop an application called “book reviews.” (These applications are going live tonight, around midnight, so no URLs yet.) Facebook users can write and display book reviews on their profile pages, then follow a “buy at Amazon” button — and the two companies say that they have more applications in the works. Amazon also has existing ties with Facebook: Owen Van Natta, Facebook’s COO, came directly from the company.

Microsoft and Amazon are both are competing with Google on multiple fronts; Facebook, meanwhile, competes with Google’s Orkut. Facebook Platform gives each of these three companies a new way to stay relevant to users, especially younger demographics, even as Google continues to expand its own lines of products and integrate them together.

This may also be bad news for startups. On the good side, Facebook will let users pick and choose their own apps — and they can remove Facebook features like “notes” or “events.” So startups, including many of the 65 Platform partners at F8 today, do have equal access to Facebook users. If Facebook users prefer a startup’s app to those of Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon apps, that startup will succeed without interference. Except that Microsoft and Amazon can now tie in their millions of users to Facebook.

Of course we had to ask Zuckerberg the big question. Did this notable warming with Microsoft suggest a possible acquisition may be in the works? Zuckerberg said Facebook is not entertaining an offer.

updated

Serial entrepreneur Sean Parker’s new philanthropy focused company, Project Agape, launches tonight, with a special version of its software tailored for Facebook users.

It is called Causes on Facebook.

Just as significant as its launch, however, is its intent to showcase the strengths of Facebook’s new “Platform,” a set of tools to allow developers to build applications upon Facebook. More on that in a second.

Project Agape is the most ambitious social network we’ve seen that lets people mobilize around causes of their choice. It has been secretive until now, providing a sneak preview to a handful of people, including VentureBeat (see coverage). Even today, its release for Facebook’s platform is a limited one. A more extensive version will be released next month.

A competitor, Change.org, launched just two days ago (see our coverage). That network focuses on political change. Its service tries to tap users to choose slates of politicians and other recommendations to effect change. But that site is bare bones, and still has relatively few users.

While Agape too is new, its advantage is formidable. Its software is by far the most integrated of any third-party company into the Facebook platform. Any of Facebook’s more than 24 million users can select Agape from a menu, and with one-click install it on their Facebook toolbar for continuous use. See early screenshots at bottom.

Here’s how it works:

Called “Causes on Facebook,” it allows you to create a cause, or promote an existing one to their friends You can pick from 1.5 million non-profits in the U.S. It uses Facebook’s “feed” feature to notify friends when you’ve joined a new cause. Finally, it allows you to promote the cause in other ways, building up points through a reward system, letting you show off virtual trophies that you win on your profile page after say, donating money. Ultimately, it wants to make it easier to raise money for causes. It launches with formal partnerships with ten non-profits.

It plans to use Facebook’s “social graph,” or the network of relationships users have with their friends, and their friends’ friends. The point is to mirror real life, where activists and other fund-raisers reach out to influencers and ask them to reach out to their own followers. (We wrote about this in our first post). Facbook Photos and Facebook Events have done well by building on this. “Cesar Chavez would ask a farmer to gather their friends in their hut, and he would talk to them,” explains Joe Green who co-founded Agape with Parker.

The two go further, arguing that young people have become alienated from political and social causes precisely because there has been no way to mobilize online. They point to an “erosion of social capital” caused by modern lifestyles. A decline in local chapter-style organizations has left a void, they say.

Parker’s convinced this will work because Facebook’s users exhibit a higher level of engagement than most sites. About 50 percent visit the site daily, with an average use-time of more than a hour.

One advantage Agape has is how it sits on top of Facebook’s platform. New internet companies find it hard to attract users from scratch. Most try a “sucking” strategy. Photo, video and other companies, for example, let users place so-called widgets on sites like MySpace, and by trying to suck those users back to their own sites with links, registrations and so on. Agape’s method is different because it seeks to remain native to Facebook, with style and features that make it look like just another Facebook application. It uses Facebook’s mark-up language, “FBML.” Its icon is similar to that of Facebook Photos and Groups.

The close partnership stems from Parker’s relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook. Parker was an early collaborator at Facebook, before leaving the company more than a year ago. Green, meanwhile, was Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard.

“Causes on Facebook,” is just one of 80 applications built by 65 companies on Platform. Zuckerberg announced more details about the platform just now during his keynote address. He emphasized that Facebook will encourage companies to make money from advertising and other transactions, giving them free access to the “canvas” pages of their applications to do as they please. This contrasts with the more closed nature of other networks, such as MySpace, which notoriously shut down access to Photobucket when that company tried to promote sponsorships. Zuckerberg also called on to the stage representatives from Microsoft, Amazon and Slide to announce integration partnerships.

Update: One attendee, I think it was Saar Gur from Charles River Ventures, went so far as to say this might represent the “end of Web 2.0.” Most new consumer Internet companies will feel forced to launch from within Facebook, because of its huge base of young, interested, experiment-happy users. If you can’t succeed there, can you hope to do so outside? So Facebook becomes the platform. Provocative thought, and clearly an overstatement, but it stayed with me.

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