Last week (October 9) Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reported that MySpace Platform would be launching this week. Arrington's report was based on contacts with third-party developers who were providing input on the MySpace project.

According to Arrington, the MySpace Platform will

essentially be a set of APIs and a new markup language that will allow third party developers to create applications that run within MySpace. Developers will be able to include Flash applets, iFrame elements and Javascript snippets in their applications, and access most of the core MySpace resources (profile information, friend list, activity history, etc.).

Interestingly, as things stand now, MySpace Platform applications must be hosted on MySpace servers. Also reported was that developers will be able to serve their own ads within their applications and will be able to keep all the revenue from these ads.

As for the requirement to be hosted on MySpace servers, I'm guessing some creative developer will quickly find a way around this requirement and MySpace will end up moving closer to Facebook's model regarding the administration of apps.

I was alerted to this news last week by a friend who pointed out a thread about it on ABestWeb. We both have Facebook apps and talked about some of the implications of building MySpace apps. It's exciting to see MySpace open up their API since MySpace currently has more users than Facebook does.

Because of the lateness of their entry into this space, though, I think MySpace apps will be playing catchup to Facebook for a long time. I also think the college age plus demographics of Facebook users may be more favorable for monetizing apps since virtually all Facebook users are old enough to have credit cards.

Other thoughts . . . As Arrington suggested, I expect Google's Orkut and other social networking players like MSN and Yahoo! Groups will emerge with competing API services soon. It also wouldn't surprise me if business networks like LinkedIn enter this space with professionally-oriented services (with controls that allow them to get through the corporate firewalls that are blocking many purely social networks). If the buzz gets loud enough, companies not even in this space now like CardScan might make even a run at it.