MySpace makes profiles portable
- Added:
- May 09, 2008
MySpace is now letting users share their pages on partner sites, announcing deals with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter in the process.
The move is similar to Google’s OpenSocial and the Facebook platform, but the difference is that rather than importing sites and information into users profiles, users can now export their profiles into other sites.
“The walls around the garden are coming down—the implementation of Data Availability injects a new layer of social activity and creates a more dynamic Internet,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace. “We, alongside our Data Availability launch partners, are pioneering a new way for the global community to integrate their social experiences Web-wide.”
MySpace’s ‘Data Availability’ platform gives users control over what information they share and who they share it with on participating sites, which so far includes Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter.
Additionally, rather than updating information for each site, now a user can update their profile in one place and dynamically share that information with the other sites.
MySpace will be rolling out a centralised location within the site that allows users to manage how their content and data is made available to third party sites they have chosen to engage with.
To ease implementation for participating sites, the MySpace Data Availability initiative uses OAUTH and Restful APIs as its core technology underpinnings. MySpace is using open standards in an effort to embrace the open source community and allow the implementation to be as non-proprietary as possible.
MySpace’s Data Availability complements Yahoo!’s recently announced Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), a company-wide initiative to open Yahoo! to application developers.
For example, users that have chosen to share their MySpace data and content with Yahoo! Instant Messenger might find their MySpace default photo, interests, and favorite music displayed to their Messenger contacts directly in the IM client.
Additionally, MySpace users will be able to choose to display their data within Yahoo!’s universal profile or leverage it in Yahoo! Mail's smarter inbox, both launching later this year.
In addition, eBay profiles can be enhanced with MySpace bios, while Photobucket users will be able to have a single view of their photos across multiple services, as well as opt-in to displaying their MySpace profile data in their Photobucket albums.
Meanwhile Twitter users can incorporate their MySpace profile content and data points previously not included in the Twitter product suite.