Thinking of Developing a MySpace App?

Since MySpace recently launched its MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), I was looking for some statistics on the virality of MySpace apps.

According to Fred Wilson, Zynga, which has launched a couple of Apps on MDP, has done some interesting research and found the following:

1) Myspace apps are not taking off in the same speed that Facebook apps did (see below). This is probably because MySpace is currently not promoting these apps nor linking to them in any way. There is no newsfeed to promote the apps and apps are only visible on profiles. You cannot invite friends to an app and apps cannot message users in any way. For now, apps are being installed only by those users who are aware that there is such a thing as apps.myspace.com. As Wilson writes, this may be a deliberate move on MySpace’s behalf: “This may well be an attempt by MySpace to avoid the “app spam” that became a problem with the Facebook platform and has been largely eliminated with the new rules that Facebook has implemented.”

2) There are major differences between the top twenty apps on MySpace as opposed to the top twenty on Facebook (see below).  It is not yet clear why these differences exist, however, I believe that it’s just too early to tell which apps will be most popular on Facebook as all this is still in development plus many of the apps on Facebook are not yet available on MySpace.

I also understand from a friend who’s working on a MySpace app that even though apps created for MySpace should supposedly work on all other OpenSocial networks, several changes are still required in order to upload the app on each of the platforms.

In spite of all this, I still believe that developing a MySpace app now has enormous potential and at some point soon, the virality of these apps will take off in full speed.  I do think that players who get in on the action early will enjoy dominant positions later on. In addition, in order to stay competitive, MySpace has allowed platform developers to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.