MySpace Launches OpenSocial 0.8 Support

Earlier this week MySpace announced that they have released support for OpenSocial 0.8. The service will also be backwards compatible which means existing applications will still run on the platform as-is. With the release of OpenSocial 0.8 MySpace is also announcing a few new features including:

• New Permission Model (”OpenCanvas”) – Similar to Facebook who lets users visit an application prior to adding it, the new permission model will “allow users to control whether or not applications can read their Basic Info on the canvas page without having to intall or ‘add’ the application.”
• Upload Photos – In this new release, developers will be able to upload photos directly to a user’s photo albums. This is something Facebook has been offering since the launch of their platform. MySpace has finally added this feature.
• Publish Activities – Developers will now be able to publish the activities of users within applications to friends of a given application user. These activities are published through MySpace’s relatively new feed feature.

There are a few other notes that MySpace published in their blog post about the updates so check it out if you’d like to know more details. Given that MySpace is the largest implementation of OpenSocial, this is a pretty big deal for OpenSocial as a whole. hi5 was the first to support the new OpenSocial version but many developers have complained that the new implementation isn’t fully functional.

I’m sure MySpace developers will be pleased with this update. Having activities published also adds a new viral channel to the MySpace platform. I’m guessing that developers will take advantage of this immediately.