New Viral Channel for MySpace Apps

Test User — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:41:00 GMT

App Activities are now visible to all the friends of a user, regardless if they have the App installed. This means that App Activities are another channel by which your App can virally grow.

If you are already publishing App Activities, you technically do not need to make any changes, however we encourage you to think about how to best leverage App Activities as a user acquisition channel.

To ensure a quality user experience, we provide users the ability to block unwanted App Activities and other communications. If the user has the App installed, they will have the option to turn off receiving App Activities for the App or uninstalling the App. If the user does not have the App installed, they have the option to block all communications from the App.

As always, the user experience is of utmost concern to us. We'll be closely monitoring the use of this feature. Any developers that are found to be abusing this functionality to the detriment of the user or in violation of the Terms of Usage will be dealt with immediately.

The team has put in a lot of hard work into this feature and the required infrastructure to support it. We look forward to seeing the results of developers taking advantage of this new viral growth channel. Please send us your feedback and success stories.

Beta Release of the MySpace Custom Application Activities

Test User — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:18:00 GMT

As part of the OpenSocial 0.8 release , we're proud to announce a Developer Only release of MySpace Custom Application Activities. App Activities allow developers to get app-related events and messages into the Friends Update feed that appears on a user's home page.

What does a custom app activity event look like? Here's a portion of my Friend Update feed:

As a developer, you'll be able to define your Activity Templates and then raise events using those templates in your OpenSocial applications. If you want to skip the chit-chat, you can get started right away by going to the template editor.

A templatelink appear under each app on the developers My Apps section. See screen shot below:

App Activities Key Limitations:

1. Only developers of the apps can successfully raise activity events.
2. Only developers of the apps will see the activity events in their Friend Updates feeds.
3. Apps can raise activity events *without* triggering the Activity Permissions pop-up

Point #3 is important because when Activitiesgo live, users of the apps will get a pop-up asking for their permission to notify their friends about the activity. This should have implications in developer's design decisions on when and how frequently to raise activity events.

Limitations, Restrictions and Known Issues

There is a full list of limitations, restrictions and bugs on the Activities Forum.

Getting Started with the Editor

The template editor is your primary point of interaction for defining activity templates. The template editor allows you to define and preview templates, and provides sample JavaScript for use in your apps. The variables and media items are only used for previewing your events. Please see the Getting Started documentation for a full walkthrough.

Raising the event

The code sample below shows how to raise the event. (We are using some jQuery constructions here, but you probably be able to see what is going on).

function opt_callBack(response){
//only for developers, on a developers template we will give you some detailed error info back!
if (response.hadError()){
//using some jQuery magic
$("#status").append("<span style='color:red'>" + response.getErrorMessage() + "</span>");
}
}

We are looking forward to your feedback,

Marco, @nkur, Jitesh and the full MDP team.

MySpace Developer Team : Marco

New Viral Channel for MySpace Apps

Beta Release of the MySpace Custom Application Activities