MySpace

The super big news this afternoon is that MySpace has joined the DataPortability movement in a big way. Here's all you need to know about this announcement:

1. some of the data (photos, videos, text) stored on MySpace will be available to their friend networks which include: Yahoo!, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket.

2. it's not really data portability, more like data sharing

3. it's live data sharing -- if you change your status from male to female, it's instantly zapped to all of the places you've shared the info. This is awesome because it makes it easier than having to remember to change it in a million social networks.

4. They will accept Facebook into their data sharing plan but Zucks gotta be the one to make the call.

SAI has notes from the live conference call and Venture Beat has detailed analysis of the announcement. Check out all of our DataPortability coverage.

Chris Saad, data portability leader sent over the following video that explains the companies that have signed up to push info in and those who have signed up to suck info out.

Editor's note: Yesterday we wrote about the new MySpace featured gallery for applications with a cost ranging between $50-100k per week. Hussein Fazal, AdParlor CEO has put together an analysis of how long it would take to show a return on the featured investment.

I just read Nick O-Neill's article MySpace Begins Charging for Application Promotion. Instead of taking the approach that most are taking by simply declaring it outrageous, I decided to take a mathematical approach and look at the ROI. I have made many assumptions and obviously every app is different. I have tried to take an average or an educated guess in some cases - PLEASE let me know if you have any reason to believe they are far off.

MySpace has ~15 Million unique visitors / week. Let's say of those 15 million, 1% check out the application directory - 150,000 people. Assume a conversion rate (people who see your promotion click on in and add your application) of 30% (It is quite the prominent display) so 45,000 people add your application. Also assume that each person has an average of 3 friends who also add the application, so you are looking at a total of 180,000 installations from your $75,000 investment!

Now, assume each person that adds your application will visit your canvas page 5 times a week.

Showing ads on your canvas page, an ad network like AdParlor has an ~eCPM of $2/1000 impressions, let's be conservative and use an eCPM of $1/1000 impressions so each person who adds your application will earn about 0.5 cents / week. Earning 0.5 cents/week from each of these 180,000 people = $900/week. That translates to about 83 weeks (~1.5 years) to earn back your $75,000.

I will leave it up to you now to decide if it is worth the investment?

Let the "featured application" wars begin! Today we've learned that MySpace is now charging to be listed in their "featured apps" section on the MySpace Apps Gallery. The Apps Gallery launched to all MySpace users a week ago.

How much is a placement? Nick O'Neill says it's $100,000 per WEEK. And guess who has all four slots -- the company supposedly worth half a billion dollars, Slide. So basically the app gallery will now feature those with deep pockets and MySpace tells all other application developers to f-off. How many app developers can afford that kind of money? Few. Of course if MySpace can show that a week in a sponsored slot leads to enough users installing an application to justify the cost, other developers might scrape every penny to get in.

To play devil's advocate, SimplyHired also allows you to pay for your job listings to show up first on results pages. Google let's you buy keywords for terms you are interested in. If you see the apps gallery as a search result page, why shouldn't MySpace be allowed to sell the space to the highest bidder?

Peter Kafka goes with the "I am a stockholder" view which is to suck them dry. Adam Ostrow makes the point clear:

Applications like Top Friends and Super Poke have huge brand recognition, and the fact that those apps can now be front and center is going to make it nearly impossible for an upstart with little cash to gain big-time popularity. It also means that the big developers can piggy back on the little guys for innovation – copying promising ideas and then writing a check to MySpace to steal all of the exposure.

Here's the difference between the MySpace platform and the Facebook platform. Facebook needs the developers and their apps for growth. MySpace doesn't and that's why they can charge and get away with it. If Facebook were smart they would play this up bigtime as to why they are the better choice for developers.

LinkedIn community evangelist Mario Sundar has posted a chart from Nielsen showing the top social networks and their growth over the past year (March-March). I've embedded the chart below. The analysis is based on U.S. home and work traffic and does not include international traffic.

LinkedIn shows growth at 319% while Facebook only grew 98% and MySpace barely grew at 9%. I'd suggest that Facebook and MySpace have the market nearly tapped so their growth will be slower than LinkedIn. Buzznet also grew nicely at 49%.

A year ago the Facebook fans claimed LinkedIn was dead and that Facebook would replace LinkedIn as the business networking tool of choice. I haven't seen that happen and if anything, I've seen more LinkedIn requests than Facebook requests lately. Do you believe Facebook will still replace LinkedIn as the business social network?

Drama 2.0 also wonders Are the Most LinkedIn Really LinkedOut?

The MySpace Application Gallery which semi-launched a month ago has moved into a full public launch today. MySpace will be promoting the gallery heavily going forward which makes sense -- if they want developers to build applications on their platform, they need to be the vehicle that brings users to the applications. Don't make the developers do the marketing for the apps, let MySpace handle that piece.

MySpace notes the ways they will promote the gallery:

• The MySpace.com home page will feature an Application Gallery icon at the top of the page, so users can easily be directed to the Gallery
• Users will have one-click access to the Application Gallery from their home page through their individual “Control Panels”
• The Application Gallery splash page will be launched with featured apps in effort to further promote applications and support developers

The gallery will also be accessible in multiple languages based on the user's preferences. With the current health status of Facebook applications, MySpace needs to capitalize on this and do whatever they can to sign on developers to their platform. It's the perfect time for a potential switch operation.

MySpace is announcing the public launch of the MySpace India site today. The site is a dedicated community designed for Indian users of the social networking service. MySpace has partnered with Star TV, and Indian television network, to create an original network television program “Campus Star”, similar to American Idol here in the U.S.

Some of the MySpace executive team are in India this week to help promote the new site. There will be a variety of parties and events throughout the week. On April 21, MySpace will hold a “devJAM” workdshop in India. The “devJAM” workshops allow local developers to meet with MySpace staff and discuss development topics with regards to building on the MySpace platform.

MySpace also recently launched a Korean site along with a Spanish U.S. site.

MySpace has announced that their Latino portal has exited the beta phase and is officially launched today. MySpace Latino offers content in both English and Spanish and targets bilingual Americans. MySpace notes that they have over 9.7 million Hispanic members.

MySpace has also signed a variety of sponsored channels including: Acústico, Entérate, TodoFútbol and En Tu Ciudad. The company has also partnered with Gibson Guitar and Billboard music.

MySpace will also host a music event named "Show Secreto" on April 11th to kick off the new site.

Yesterday I asked whether search engines in other languages who focus outside the U.S. will target niches inside the U.S. This launch by MySpace is similar and makes me believe even stronger that we will see more of these localized plays within the U.S.

This morning Yahoo, Google and MySpace announced the launch of the OpenSocial Foundation. There is a call scheduled for 1pm Eastern to discuss the news. Below are our live call notes - newest notes at the top. We will note once the call has concluded.

view the live notes »

Yahoo has announced this morning that they have joined the OpenSocial Movement, created and run by Google. I don't get it - Yahoo was just starting to appear to have some legs as they are fighting the Microsoft takeover and yet they throw in the cards and join Google?

The new crew has also announced plans to create the OpenSocial Foundation. From Yahoo, "The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction."

Caroline McCarthy at CNET was able to grab a quote from Facebook. Facebook is not part of OpenSocial as they created their own developer platform last year.

"As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation," a statement from the company read. "The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience."

There is a call scheduled at 1pm today to discuss the announcement and as (almost) always, we will cover the call live. Be here at 1pm Eastern for the goodies.

MySpace has announced the launch of their application gallery which will allow MySpace users to add the applications (mostly widgets) to their profiles. This is basically the first real-world use of OpenSocial to-date.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable has an interview with Kyle Brinkman, VP and GM of the MySpace Developer Platform. Ostrow also notes that the platform is missing the messaging component so communications won't be smooth for now. The platform opened for developers about a month ago. While the gallery won't be pushed on MySpace yet, we're sure that all of the Ashley Tisdale fans will be bling'in out their profiles by the end of today.

We've heard from multiple platform developers who have said that the process is a "mess" compared to leveraging Facebook's platform.

Mike Berkley, SplashCast CEO sent over some information about the applications his company has created to leverage the MySpace platform. Berlkey notes, 'each of the SplashCast applications contain dynamically updated video channels programmed by the label, streaming music videos, "lifestyle" (behind the scenes) footage and personal video messages by the artists. They also contain live chat and "fan channels" where users can submit their own favorite photos, songs, & videos (from their cell phone, computer, or pulled from YouTube) to the application and shared by the entire fan community.

Not sure why you need a platform to do the things above and not just on a typical profile/widget but in any event, here is an example of what the Ashley Tisdale application looks like: