MySpace Outlines Open Strategy with "MySpace Open Platform" Framework; Unveils Global Partnerships with Vodafone and Netvibes for ‘MySpaceID’

PARIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MySpace, the world’s premier social network, today introduced the ‘MySpace Open Platform’ a suite of products including the MySpace Application Platform, ‘MySpaceID’ (formerly Data Availability) and Post-To MySpace. Ushering in the new structure, MySpace announced an additional roster of global partners for MySpaceID, empowering MySpace’s global community to take their experience Web-wide. New MySpaceID partners include Vodafone and Netvibes—all of which are currently developing MySpaceID implementations. MySpaceID enables all global MySpace users to be in control of their personal and portable social identity whenever they travel online.

Also today, MySpace announced its support for Google Friend Connect as a component of MySpaceID. Google Friend Connect is a service that helps Website owners grow traffic by enabling any Website to easily provide social features. MySpace’s support of Google Friend Connect extends the reach of MySpaceID, empowering MySpace to better cater to the long tail of the development community.

“We’ve seen the evolution of the Web move from curated experiences to personalized start pages and now we’re in the age of identity management. MySpace is uniquely positioned as the leader in the future of the global social Web by both representing our users’ social lives and by aggregating the world’s people, content, and culture. The MySpace Open Platform frames our vision for the future of the social Web,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace.

MySpaceID, a core product within the MySpace Open Platform, is currently live with implementations including AOL, Flock, Eventful, Flixster, and Yoono among others. MySpaceID consists of two core components: (1) Open Standards (“The Open Stack” including OpenSocial, OAuth, and OpenID) and (2) Google Friend Connect.

MySpaceID allows users to:

• Connect MySpace profile data to partner sites (Now available)
• Find MySpace friends on a partner site (Now available)
• Register on partner sites using their MySpace URL
• Publish activities from partner sites to MySpace
• Syndicate activities on MySpace to partner sites

“Six months ago we publicly launched the first solution to empower social networking users to take their identity around the Web,” said Amit Kapur, COO of MySpace. “Since then the developer community has been steadily rolling out new implementations to leverage this technology—we’ve been listening to their feedback and enhancing the product along the way.”

Today’s ‘MySpaceID’ announcements were made on-site at the Le Web 08 Conference in Paris prior to the keynote conversation between MySpace’s Chief Operating Officer Amit Kapur and Tech Crunch Founder and Co-Editor Michael Arrington.

MySpaceID on Vodafone

As part of their long lasting collaboration, MySpace and Vodafone have jointly evolved the OpenSocial standard to enhance the MySpace experience in the mobile environment.

With the roll out of MySpaceID Vodafone's customers can simply link to their MySpace account and share their details, interests, content as well as connect with friends.

"Ever since Vodafone launched Mobile Internet, social networks have belonged amongst most popular sites accessed through mobiles,” said Sacha Tueni Social Networks Partnership Manager at Vodafone Group. "MySpaceID will enhance the social networking experience further, and, utilizing our high-speed 3G network, make it faster and easier for our customers to connect and stay in touch with friends whenever and wherever they are."

MySpaceID on Netvibes

Netvibes plans on leveraging MySpaceID to help its users easily connect with their MySpace friends and share activities with them.

"We're excited by the MySpaceID product to help make our start page experience more compelling for our users," said Freddy Mini, CEO of Netvibes. "This integration definitely compliments our strategy of pushing personalized social information to our users."

MySpaceID + Google Friend Connect

MySpace’s support of Google Friend Connect is a key next step in widening the scope of what MySpaceID can deliver to the average developer. MySpaceID will serve major initiatives such as Vodafone and Netvibes and because of Friend Connect’s ease of implementation it will be more easily accessible to any small developer seeking to make their site more social.

"We're excited to work with MySpace on their integration of MySpaceID with Google Friend Connect", said David Glazer, Engineering Director at Google. "The beauty of open standards (OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial) is how easy they make it for users anywhere on the web to connect with the people they care about."

Developers looking for more information on how to use MySpaceID should visit the MySpace Developer Site.

About MySpace

MySpace, a unit of Fox Interactive Media Inc., is the premier lifestyle portal for connecting with friends, discovering popular culture, and making a positive impact on the world. MySpace has created a connected global community by integrating web profiles, blogs, instant messaging, e-mail, music streaming, music videos, photo galleries, classified listings, events, groups, college communities, and member forums. MySpace's international network includes more than 30 localized community sites in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Latin America, Mexico, Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, India, Japan, and New Zealand. Fox Interactive Media is a division of News Corp. (NYSE:NWS) (NYSE:NWS.A) (ASX:NWS) (ASX:NWSLV).

Among the top 2000 domains comScore Media Metrix, October 2008. For more information on comScore Networks, please go to www.comscore.com.

About Vodafone

Vodafone is the world's leading international mobile communications group with approximately 280 million proportionate customers as of 30 September 2008. Vodafone currently has equity interests in 27 countries across five continents and over 40 partner networks worldwide. For more information, please visit www.vodafone.com.

About Netvibes

Founded in 2005, Netvibes pioneered the personalized startpage as alternative to traditional web portals. Today, Netvibes is a global community of users who are taking control of their digital lives by personalizing their web experience. Netvibes lets individuals assemble all in one place their favorite widgets, websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, and everything else they enjoy on the Web.

Netvibes helps the world's top brands, marketing agencies and developers create cross-platform widgets, guarantee distribution and installation across a global audience of widget users on Netvibes.com, and deploy custom branded widget startpage portals within their own Web properties. Netvibes has offices in Paris, London and San Francisco.