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MySpace gets friendlier
09-05-2008
by Emmet Ryan

Less than two years after saying it would never happen, MySpace has taken the first steps towards making social networks interoperable.

MySpace is going to allow its members to transport their profile pages to other sites across the web. This will allow them to import information such as their age and photos directly onto these sites at the touch of a button. "The walled-garden approach will not survive in the long run," MySpace chief operating officer Amit Kapur told BusinessWeek.

This is a stark contrast to the comments made by MySpace's vice president of European operation, Jay Stevens, to ENN in October 2006. Speaking at the Empathy Marketing conference in Dublin he said sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace were unlikely to ever develop a platform that would allow profiles of users to be integrated across multiple social networking sites.

With the likes of Twitter and Yahoo signing up to the new service by MySpace, the barriers such as integration are coming down. The social network is enabling members to share information with these sites in a user-friendly manner, one which will make it easier for these users to mix and match information across the internet. The natural evolution of this will be further ease across more sites as the social network moves to cater to user demands.

Of course MySpace isn't doing this out of the goodness of its heart. The social network was soaring two years ago, when wider interoperability seemed anything but a possibility. Recent times though have seen traffic growth slow somewhat and MySpace sees these new partnerships as a means of building traffic and with it ad revenue.

These new partners include social networking service Twitter, which is one of the current hip kids of the internet. Twitter allows users to post short messages which are then transmitted to other users that have signed up to follow these messages.

An Irish entrepreneur is currently trialling a new service for Twitter. Pat Phelan, from Cork, has launched a web application called Twitterfone which is currently under private trial. More than 15,000 people have applied to use the service which allows users to ring a local phone number and leave a short message which is then automatically posted on Twitter.

It's creative developments like this that has MySpace moving to tear down the walls between it and other sites. Despite being a young company by traditional standards, online the social network could become an old fogey quickly if it fails to keep up with emerging trends.