If you want me to pick the hottest news in February other than the Yahoo! bid, I would agreed that it was MySpace Developer Platform and its social platform war. MySpace, as the top social networking site, has widely reported that lagged behind in building a truly social platform, whareas Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster have all expanded to this social platform territories. It is common sense to assume that MySpace did not started its serious incursion into this territory because of the second-mover strategy. They have reported more than 200 million user accounts, without being the early leader in the social platform arena, they still owned the largest number of users throughout the world. However, the launched of a platform that enables a range of social software solutions will make their technology appreciably more easy.

On 5 February 2008, MySpace announced the MySpace Developer Platform and released API (application programming interface), it became a huge opportunity for Web 2.0 startups to build applications based on MySpace API and from there, directly engage with the MySpace’s 200 million users. Currently, MySpace Developer Platform is in sandbox phase, that means documentation, capabilities, and end-user features are slowly adding to their developer site. Meanwhile, MySpace users would only allowed to access all the applications on MySpace Application Gallery in early next month. Given the brand name of MySpace, Slide, the world’s largest personal media company, has announced that it will launch several new applications, including Slide FunWall and Slide SuperPoke on MySpace.

via [CNET]