Special Guest Blogger: Nick Thomas on MySpace's Open Platform

Nate Elliott | October 19, 2007, 11:17 AM

As a Friday morning special, I've asked my colleague Nick Thomas to weigh in with his thoughts on MySpace's announcement that they'll open their platform to third-party application developers. Nick is our European Media Analyst, and he's just putting the final touches on our deepest research report yet into how Europeans interact with social networking sites. Here's what he had to say about the announcement:

MySpace’s announcement that it is opening up its platform to external developers, following on the heels of announcements about the integration of Skype into the site, and details of further localized launches, reminds us that while Rupert Murdoch’s admiration for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is widely-reported, his appetite for competition is as strong in the web space as it is in the newspaper market.

Looking beyond the PR value of these moves – not to be underestimated in an industry especially sensitive to market momentum – this represents a significant shift by MySpace. While Facebook has benefited to date from a buzzing micro-economy of companies building on its platform, MySpace has preferred to control its own development. But by opening up its platform (albeit with a more hybridized model than Facebook’s), and incentivizing developers with a share of future ad revenues, MySpace is acknowledging that social media has changed the market. And that to maintain its status as the market leader MySpace needs to evolve.

Such evolution is vital: social networks need to innovate and add value to their sites at a dramatic rate to maintain their meteoric momentum and to retain users, but that would be virtually impossible using their own resources. Even if many of its applications in themselves are fluffy rather than game-changing, Facebook’s achievement has been to establish the idea of widgetization: Facebook says 80% of its users have downloaded at least one. The principle of allowing external developers – your community - to build new applications comes more easily to a pure web player like Facebook than to a subsidiary of News Corp, whose companies are more used to tightly controlling their own destinies. But Murdoch’s willingness to embrace disruptive strategies, like his enthusiasm for a battle, should not be underestimated.

People tend to get lost in the Facebook hype these days. (And make no mistake, Facebook have done some very good things.) But as Nick points out, MySpace is still the clear industry leader: according to Nick's upcoming report, MySpace have more than twice as many European users as any other social network. So by opening their platform, they'll more than triple the number of European users that third-party application developers and content owners can reach through social networks. That's quite a windfall -- but it also means that widget makers may have to start thinking hard about where to focus their development resources.

If you're a JupiterResearch client, we've got lots of recent research into social networking sites you may find interesting while you await Nick's report: Thomas Husson's report on Mobile Social Networks in Europe, Emily Riley's report on Social Networks in the US, and my report on Social Marketing in Europe.