MySpace on Wednesday launched a new suite of APIs in an aggressive bid to attract third party developers interested in capitalizing on the web site's real-time social networking data.
Among the APIs in Real-Time Stream, which MySpace is opening up to developers, is much of the publicly accessible content millions of users publish to MySpace.
According to MySpace, Google and the real-time search company OneRiot are among its launch partners. What that means is that MySpace app developers will connect the dots so that MySpace information like status updates, music streams, videos and other content will be more readily -- and comprehensively -- included in Google's and OneRiot's search results.
Another launch partner, Groovy, has created a public timeline application called GroovyChannel, which already appears on MySpace.
"We previously allowed developers to draw from our activity stream in a traditional polling fashion," wrote MySpace in a post to the MySpace Developer Platform blog. "Now, developers can get the same stream pushed to their sites, with additional controls and metadata."
Other APIs include Status and Mood Commenting API -- allowing developers to leverage MySpace status and mood updates, as well as peoples' comments on those updates -- and Open Search API, for searching publicly available MySpace profile information. Then there are additional APIs related to Photo Upload and other functions.
"As we look towards the future, our goal is to provide developer parity with our site; if you can do something on MySpace, you should be able to take advantage of it in your app in some meaningful way," MySpace bloggers added.
The moves will make MySpace more like Twitter, which has encouraged this kind of third party development since its inception.
MySpace also confirmed it will kick off a developer competition around the new APIs, saying it would offer cash prizes and other awards to the most creative developers. The competition kicks off on January 4.
Real-time search has become a major focus of social networks and also search engines, with Google just this week launching a real-time search capability to index content from various social networking platforms.
Once the most powerful platform in social networking, MySpace this year saw its overall market share drop by 55 percent as it battles behemoths like Facebook and upstarts like Twitter. Facebook finally overtook MySpace as the most popular social networking site in the United States in May 2009.
