MySpace Platform Launching Next Week?

According to the MySpace developer blog, on Thursday, March 13th, MySpace “will be expanding significantly the exposure of approved applications to MySpace members.” This first launch will be the the beta apps directory. Applications cannot violate the developer terms of service and must meet a “reasonable standard of functionality and value.” There’s not much elaboration as to what a reasonable standard is.

MySpace was supposed to launch March 5th and Google’s Orkut was supposed to launch around the same time. There is no word on Orkut yet as I’m guessing they are waiting to see how well OpenSocial works on their first platform launch. Erik Giberti suggested in a comment on InsideFacebook, that there are not enough security restrictions in place. From what I hear, MySpace will be using the Google co-developed Caja to make scripts safer for the site.

I’m a little bit skeptical of this new technology but I’m sure they are relatively confident that it will work effectively, otherwise they wouldn’t be launching. This will be the second platform launch since Facebook launched their platform 9 months ago.