Back in October, MySpace pledged to open its platform to developers, in part to encourage third parties to deploy widgets, games, and other social networking tools on the site, but also to help the 400-pound gorilla of the social networking world maintain its lead on rival Facebook, which has seen a tremendous surge in growth in the last year in part due to opening its platform to developers. (more…)

MySpace will formally launch its “Developer Platform” next Tuesday but is already allowing people to sign up. The tools have been developed with Google and will allow programmers to create programs similar to those used by millions on rival site Facebook. Facebook opened up its site to outside developers last year. It has since had great success, with nearly 15,000 applications written for the site. These include photo-sharing and music recommendation tools as well as games such as scrabble. (more…)

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo and state lawmakers, with the backing of the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, are pushing a bill that would crack down on sex offenders’ use of the sites. The law would require all registered sex offenders to submit any e-mail addresses and other Internet identifiers, such as screen names used for instant messaging, to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services within 10 days of their creation, just as with their home addresses. (more…)

As “Super Tuesday” on February 5 approaches, MTV and MySpace.com have announced the final installment of their ongoing “presidential dialogue” series. Co-presented by the Associated Press, the event will take place at 6 p.m. EST on Saturday, February 2; all candidates from both parties have been invited to participate, and so far, Democratic contender Hillary Clinton and Republican candidate Mike Huckabee have confirmed that they will be part of it. (more…)

In the goofiest waste of law enforcement time we’ve seen in weeks, an on-campus police officer for a Florida middle school is facing a criminal investigation over his MySpace account. Why? It turns out one of the people on his friends list had a link on his or her profile to an internet porn site. (more…)

Google is testing a new feature to allow you to target ads to specific demographics on MySpace and other web sites. So it your web site sells NY Yankee tickets and your main demographic is men aged 30-45. Your ads can show up just on profiles of men who are in that age group. You can then adjust your bids accordingly. The ads will be filtered by age and gender demographics and you can get reports to further refine your results. Many people are blind to ads on social networking sites, but assuming you’re great at capturing your audience’s attention, this could be huge. People spend a lot more time on MySpace than a regular web sites. Recent data put the average time people spend on MySpace as a whopping 29:36 minutes. Plus they return to the site more frequently. (more…)

A 17-gigabyte file purporting to contain more than half a million images lifted from private MySpace profiles has shown up on BitTorrent, potentially making it the biggest privacy breach yet on the top social networking site. The creator of the file says he compiled the photos earlier this month using the MySpace security hole that Wired News reported on last week. That hole, still unacknowledged by the News Corporation-owned site, allowed voyeurs to peek inside the photo galleries of some MySpace users who had set their profiles to “private,” despite MySpace’s assurances that such images could only be seen by people on a user’s friends’ list. (more…)

MySpace. An Internet frontier featuring settlers looking to stake their own place on this social network. A new-age phenomenon which includes more than 220 million pioneers, constructing their own Web sites to promote themselves. But who are the people of MySpace? Well, they are people of all ages who are creative, friendly, sarcastic, nice, raunchy, proud, sneaky and comical among other things. What is the draw to MySpace? What are these people looking for? (more…)

A certain group of people must have been half asleep when it watched “Field of Dreams”; with their plan to create and fund friendly companies, MySpace’s executives seem to have garbled the movie’s most quoted message into “if they don’t come, build it.” Yes, yes, we know - MySpace still gets more traffic than anything else in the business. It hasn’t gotten even half the love or attention in business and media circles, however, and so the social network seems ready to make its own little ecosystem. (more…)

Two teenage girls have been arrested in the videotaped beating of a girl that was posted on MySpace. Police in Newport Beach, California, say the 14-year-old girls were taken into custody for investigation of battery and conspiracy to commit battery. (more…)