MySpace, Facebook move to better promote third-party apps

Computerworld - SAN DIEGO -- MySpace Inc. and Facebook Inc. today separately announced plans to make it easier for developers to earn money from applications that they build and lob at users of the popular social networks.

MySpace, which officially launched its MySpace Development Platform on Feb. 5, today announced that it will allow third-party developers to use two different MySpace advertising programs to market their applications.

Amit Kapur, chief operating officer at MySpace, said that the company plans to let developers use both its HyperTargeting and SelfServe programs as part of a third phase of opening its platform to developers. Previously, the programs were open only to companies to advertise their products or services to MySpace users.

Kapur, who did not provide details on when developers could gain access to the programs, made the announcement at the O'Reilly Graphing Social Patterns West 2008 conference here.

SelfServe allows users to create customized advertisements with a new ad-creation tool, and HyperTargeting allows advertisers to connect with specific user groups based on the interests they express in their MySpace user profiles.

"Application developers are businesses -- maybe not today as much [as other businesses], but that is definitely coming in over time," Kapur added. "Application developers need to promote their products. They need to drive traffic."

HyperTargeting, Kapur noted, has already helped some advertisers boost click-through rates by 300%. The MySpace HyperTargeting program uses sophisticated machine-learning tools to analyze all the information provided by users -- including the background themes they choose for their profiles and the photos they post to their blogs -- to identify which products or services a user may be interested in, he added.

"HyperTargeting takes a look at publicly available data and places users into highly targetable interest groups," Kapur said. "While other advertising networks guess about who the user is, we know who the user is. We are going to look to facilitate developers putting these ad types on their pages so we can serve ads on their behalf."

For its part, Facebook announced new efforts to help persuade third-party developers to create more applications to run on its site. To date, more than 98% of the site's 66 million users have used at least one of the 16,000 applications created for Facebook.com by third-party developers, noted Benjamin Ling, Facebook's director of platform product marketing.

Ling said that Facebook plans to allow developers to accept credit card payments for Facebook-based e-commerce applications.

"From a user perspective ... once they've entered their credit card information, they never have to do it again," he said. "[Developers] can experiment with a variety of new applications and try things they haven't been able to do before."