One small step for MySpace’s platform, one larger step for developers: Links to the MySpace app gallery
Today, MySpace has more incremental news about its emerging developer platform. It has slightly rejigged its user interface to include a couple links to its existing gallery page of third party applications. One link is on the top toolbar on a user’s homepage, the other is on its user dashboard. These links may help more users find out about applications, even though the site has yet to add powerful ways for apps to spread among users.
MySpace has been much faster to roll out announcement about its developer platform than actual features — but that’s okay, because the site is the largest potential market left for third-party developers of social network applications.
MySpace gets around 74 million monthly active users in the US and around 110 million worldwide. As Max Levchin of leading widget-maker Slide told me yesterday, MySpace isn’t just about its size. The company matters because MySpace users in the United States like to use widgets (and presumably applications), and they’re “susceptible” to advertising.
While MySpace has allowed simple widgets for years, its developer platform offers the ability to build more complex applications that use notifications, email invites and other so-called “viral channels” to spread and keep users engaged.
So far, the gallery features more than 1,000 MySpace-approved applications that have — with minimal access to users until today — been installed a grand total of 2.1 million times.
Next Story: Silverpop, an on-demand marketer, takes $15M
Previous Story: Opportunities at VentureBeat: Event planner, tech developer, writer and more
About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.