• Mashable, Wednesday, January 30, 2008 11 AM

MySpace on Tuesday announced that its new developer platform will go live on Feb. 5. Amit Kapur, the company's new chief operating officer says it addresses many of the early growing pains suffered by rival Facebook, including privacy, monetization and data ownership.

Kapur says that avoiding the spam issues that have plagued rivals like Facebook will be a "top priority," as will be the overall user experience--so don't expect anything like Facebook Beacon to be part of the MySpace Platform. He adds that MySpace plans to help developers monetize their applications instead of leaving them to accrue ad revenue on their own. Perhaps this means the company will use its own sales force to help developers sell their inventory, which could be far easier for them than the Facebook system, whereby developers hook up with any one of a dozen ad networks.

As far as data ownership goes, Kapur says the company will maintain an open relationship with developers giving them access to data from MySpace in their applications, which possibly includes friends' data. He added that MySpace will support Google's OpenSocial from day one.

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