Apps are live on MySpace!

Just a quick note to say that the MySpace Developer Platform, which went live to developers last month, is now live to ‘regular’ users too.

That means anyone can add an app to their MySpace profile or homepage.

Congrats to everyone in the team who’ve worked some looooooong hours to get this up. Well done everyone!

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a great overview of today’s announcement and the platform:

A few key points of differentiation between MySpace, other OpenSocial “containers” and Facebook are as follows:

• Apps on the Home page.
  I believe that one of the biggest reasons Facebook apps have such low user engagement numbers is because they can’t enter the key space of the user admin page. That’s where users live, not on their own public facing profile pages. MySpace is hoping to go so far as to create an “everyperson’s Netvibes/PageFlakes/MyYahoo” experience.
• Custom namespaces
  MySpace has a long list of custom namespaces that aren’t available in OpenSocial’s most basic structure. That’s the case with almost all OpenSocial implementations, we hear, and it will be interesting to see how real the promise of interoperability is.
• Synchronous communication
  It may not be XMPP but the MySpace app namespace ONLINE_FRIENDS appears to let app developers access the sub-list of a user’s friends who are actively online. Many social activities are best done in real time (like asking for money via Lending Club? maybe not) and we’ll be interested to see what apps make use of this option.
• OAuth support
  MySpace users are going to be happy to share their contacts and info from other applications off-site with apps on the MySpace platform because they’ll be able to do so securely. MySpace is about to become the biggest use-case of the oAuth authentication protocol, something many sites are scrambling to implement. Will app developers put this to use? We’ll see.

More on Read/WriteWeb.com and also on Mashable.

(Disclosure: I work with the MySpace Developer Platform team)