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]

MySpace is partnering with a job portal CareerOne Australia in creating an Australians’ MySpaceJobs called myspacejobs.careerone.com.au. This partnership will strengthen MySpace’s overall service offerings. Particularly, their users in Australia is expected to search jobs through this site in addition to conduct online social networking activities in MySpace. Recently, most of the popular social networking platforms or the blogs we came across on the Web are adding the job sites, whether those are existed as a separate entities or through a column located in a sidebar of the blogs. The continued evolving from the current set of social networking capabilities to the site that job searching capabilities have been added not only attain a high level of popularity, but it also means that the young generation are getting harder and harder in the employment market. As The Age of Australia reported, “Bringing the employment market to them through the MySpace partnership provides Generation Y with easy access to jobs, advice and information - all specifically tailored to their demographic.”

The Australian MySpace Jobs portal includes many of the features valuable to the job seekers, such as the cool jobs available from time to time, MySpaceJobs community, current job opportunities, and the online know-how tools that include cover letter and resume samples, and etc.

Photobucket today is announcing its first integration with MySpace since it has been acquired by the latter in May this year. If you look at both sides and how MySpace planned to integrate Photobucket as one of the third-party application provider to their social network, it took both of these two companies more than six months to do it. This has been a challenge since the images stored by Photobucket users have inevitably been stored in Photobucket’s databases, and now with this newly offered support, MySpace users can add images from Photobucket to a comment column on MySpace profile without having to leave MySpace or log-in to Photobucket. Moreover, a MySpace user can add the images originally uploaded from other users on Photobucket, as Photobucket said, there are billions of images available on its databases at this particular moment.

For recent years, Web 2.0 firms have realized integration with other party only offered greater value. I am looking forward to see that any further integration between these two companies in near future.

MySpace UK is launching a new service in the U.K. called Earwig TV. It is a new site that aggregate new artists and bands from MySpace into one site. This site will attract a lot of musical talents and record companies as Earwig TV being a platform for both of these parties. At first, this new service will feature the 11 artists, all their videos have been added to MySpaceTV in less than 15 days.

The launched of Earwig TV is truly extended MySpace as the social networking site that heavily involved in music services as majority of its users are music lovers. With this new site, the existing MySpace users might find MySpace visiting a lot of more enjoyable. And this definitely build a strong foundation for MySpace in monetize it in the future.

Israeli news provider GLOBES [online] is reporting that MySpace has planned to open an Israeli branch, as well as to acquire radio stations over the coming years. This news comes shortly after the released of another interesting article entitled, “Google Israel CEO: Israel’s consumers impress execs,” that talked about the attractive position of high-tech market in Israel.