MySpace is a busy place. For example, our users share approximately 35 million public activities and updates per day. As a platform, we’re committed to open standards, and providing rich data, available to the world in real-time. We’ve made many strides in exposing more data in the last couple months:
- We’ve included access to MySpace content using the latest version of the OpenSocial v0.9 standard.
- Our team developed the MySpace JSL (JavaScript Library), a lightweight library that provides the ability to write to the MySpace Stream from a web application, and retrieve social data using OpenSocial.
- In a series of API stream enhancements, we’ve exposed the ability to read and write comments. We also included semantic concepts from the activitystreams standard (among other changes). All additions are in OpenSocial-compliant extensions.
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.
Today, we are proud to announce new features that expand the way we expose data for developers.
Real-Time Stream APIWe previously allowed developers to draw from our activity stream in a traditional polling fashion. Now, developers can get the same stream pushed to their sites, with additional controls and metadata.
Highlights include:
- A rich stream of events, using ActivityStrea.ms atom extensions, with additional contextual information delivered via Portable Contacts, geo and ranking atom extensions.
- The powerful subscription query language lets you specify multiple topics (at launch you can save 20 queries per application).
- Public and private channels that respect users’ privacy. With the same performance, you can get friends-only updates or public updates.
- A robust transport layer, which includes retries on failure, and batching. In addition, a mechanism that alerts when queries are deactivated.
- Powerful sampling controls; you can specify a sample rate, target location, source application as well as the ability to filter by object type.
- Strong open standards. Our PUSH technology follows PubSubHubbub’s hub-to-subscriber, and industry-standard HTTP authentication.
See the documentation for more information: Real-Time Stream Functional Overview
Open Search API
Just as you can search for people on MySpace, you can now search via our API. A search can be by name, email address or profile type (e.g. musician, celebrity, comedian). Further, you can filter a search result by gender, age and location.
See the documentation for more details: Open Search
Status and Mood Commenting API
Through the new API, users can interact with that stream without leaving an external service. If a user comments on a MySpace status on your site, you can now upload that comment back into a user’s MySpace activity stream.
See the documentation for more details: Status and Mood Comments
Photo Upload API
Adding to our support for media items, you can now upload photos from your site into MySpace (we’ve always supported the ability to download). This includes the creation of public or private albums.
See the documentation for more details: Media Items
Updated Version of Post To/Share On MySpace
We’ve updated the way to simply share content with friends on MySpace from third party sites. Now, when a user posts content from another site, it goes directly into the activity stream as a rich link back to the external service (opposed to a status, or bulletin).
See the documentation for more details: Post To MySpace
We already have early adopters using our new data sources. OneRiot is launching their real-time search integration today, and Groovy Corporation is also including MySpace into their massively parallel processing technology. Google will be leveraging our data in their Google Real-Time Search shortly, as well.
To usher in our new resources, we’re initiating our MySpace Developer Challenge, a competition aimed at encouraging further innovation from our developer partners. Awards will be cash prizes and premium marketing on MySpace for the most interesting use of the new APIs. Our judging panel will include Mike Jones - MySpace Chief Operating Officer, Ron Conway - Founder and Managing Partner of Angel Investors LP, David Glazer - Engineering Director at Google, and Robert Scoble - renowned blogger and tech evangelist. Winners will be announced at the Game Developers Conference on March 10, 2010 in San Francisco.
Please visit the new and improved developer site, http://developer.myspace.com, to get started today!