Hot on the heels of MySpace Korean comes another international addition of MySpace, i.e. MySpace India. From recent buzz on the Web, this Indian version of MySpace will going to be launched on this April 17th, and there will have an official launch party at that night as well. In particular, this party located in Taj Land’s End Amphitheater, Mumbai will be free, starting from 6pm and there are three awesome bands: Pentagram, Superfuzz, and Them Clones to be featured at that party, according to an Indian MySpacer.

Nevertheless, MySpace Indian version is up and running at this moment. In other word, Indian users can now sign-up to this site. Unlike MySpace Korean, this site will only available in English, and Indian users will not find their native languages such as Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, or Malayalam on MySpace India.

Today MySpace, the most popular online social network is expanding to South Korea by launching its Korean version. MySpace Korea seemed well equipped to take on South Korea, with a sleek design and all of its content found on the landing page has been translated to Korean. As usual, music, video, and social networking profiles are allowed for the Korean users. To celebrate their official launch, MySpace Korea will also host an official launch party tonight at design museum near Seoul’s Hongik University, and the party will be started from 7pm. Frankly, I do not know what will be the response of the Korean youngsters toward this site, but MySpace will try to make their site attractive and competitive in South Korea’s market place. Perhaps what makes them different from the other Korean social networking platforms might be its unique feature, a Twitter-like or Facebook Status-like Minilog.

South Korea, notably for a tech savvy nation, its consumer behavior much the same as China. It is a very important and difficult country for a foreign firm in building a solid base there. What role should a foreign firm play when it entered the South Korea market. MySpace said that they already have the answer. “We’ve done a lot of studies on what went wrong with those companies and why,” DeWolfe, co-founder of MySpace said in response to a question at a forum at a Seoul university. At present, MySpace Korea has created a lot of tools that cater to this country’s uniquely culture.

As the first day MySpace Korea strutted its stuff in South Korea, they definitely face stiff competition from the leader in social networking, i.e. Cyworld. Cyworld has owned the biggest crowd in South Korea’s social network arena. They’re strong, not only in term of user base, but also financially, particularly in viewed of its parent company SK Telecom, just honored as South Korea’s innovation leader.

Source: available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120785449587405545.html, accessed 15 April 2008

via [The AP]

MySpace, one of the most popular social networking platform on the Web is launching its Latino version. The launched of this Latino site is a long-awaiting response to the growing popularity of U.S. Hispanics, as claimed by MySpace, they now have more than 9.7 million Hispanics members.

“It’s been something they’ve been asking for,” said Victor Kong, the Miami-based managing director for MySpace Latino. “We’re not just duplicating everything and having the same exact programs in Spanish.”

This MySpace Latino site will be a new MySpace’s positioning. To ensure they have a successful beginning, MySpace will host a secret show (”Show Secreto”) in Miami featuring Tego Calderon, Circo and Locos por Juana.

via [AP]

Eleven months had passed since MySpace China launched in last year, and now they have a new Chinese partner, i.e. Youku, one of the China’s popular video sharing platforms. According to Youku (in Mandarin), both companies have form alliance and agreed to build a jointly video portal called MySpaceYouku.

MySpaceYouku will primarily feature the Chinese video clips, coupled with the technical support and resources, i.e. videos provided by Youku.

The MySpace Application beta gallery was actually went live on this 13th of March. As of today, there are 250 apps available for the MySpace users to install onto their own profiles, home pages or canvas pages. As I said in my previous post on MySpace Developer Platform, the launched of this platform that enables a range of social software solutions will make their technology appreciably more easy.

In a post published by the team of MySpace Developer Platform, there are apps waiting to be approved, and some of them are rejected. However, since this new platform has been key to MySpace’s new marketing positioning, it still immature to talk about how it will progress on its way to challenge Facebook Platform, while it is still establish itself as an alternative to a social platform for the Web developers.

A look at the most installs on the MySpace Application gallery will attempt to tell us which type of applications will likely to be accepted by the MySpace users.

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 application programming interface (API), 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 mean 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. In most recent, 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 mean 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.