Greetings developers! First off, a quick introduction. My name is Max Engel and I'm the new Product Manager for the MySpace Data Availability project. I'm excited to be part of this effort and we are committed to making Data Availability an open, standards-based approach that grants members greater control over their identity while also providing robust privacy controls. We have listened to your feedback about what you, as developers, want from Data Availability. Today, I am pleased to announce two significant enhancements to our platform.

API Caching: We are now enabling caching on all of our APIs. We have created a 24-hour caching policy for all data fetched through our REST services. While the caches only have to be refreshed at some point before the end of this interval, we certainly encourage you to check back more frequently to make sure that our members see their changes propagate from MySpace to your site in a timely manner. Please note that when a member decides to sever the ties between the sites, the data will have to be removed after the cache expires. We have some exciting new ideas about how to help you get more from our caching system. Expect more interesting developments on this front in the near future.

Storage of Member Profile Core Elements: We now are allowing you to store certain core elements of a member's profile. We understand that having portable profile data is essential to giving members greater freedom with their online identity. Additionally, we know that it would be a difficult requirement for you to have to purge essential data after the link with MySpace is broken. To deal with this, we have created granular scoping through OAuth to give the member control over what is shared, and hope that you find this a useful supplement to our caching policy. This new portable profile should be especially useful as a bootstrapping tool to help your new members create accounts.

Keep in mind that this is an iterative process. Please let us know what works, what doesn't, and most importantly, what you need. I've created a thread in our forums to give you a chance to sound off and let us know what you want. Check out our documentation to get more specifics on what these changes mean and how you can leverage the Data Availability project to start to create more compelling experiences for your members. This is just the tip of the iceberg as we work to do our part to help move the social web forward.

Cheers!

Max