As you will know, I’ve been working with MySpace for a number of months on a number of initiatives to help them evolve into a far more open platform.

Following on from the launch of the developer platform and REST APIs, I’m really excited to announce that MySpace has joined the DataPortability Initiative. In addition MySpace has also announced it’s first implementation in this area, which will making it’s profile data available for those to consume on other websites. From the press release:

“MySpace … will be allowing users to dynamically share the content and data of their choosing including: (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks. Integration of the Data Availability project will roll to MySpace users and participating Websites in the coming weeks.”

MySpace’s full press release is on Alley Insider. DataPortability’s press release is here.

Whilst a number of high-profile launch partners have been announced (Yahoo!, eBay and Twitter), it’s worth point out that access to this project will be available to everyone who agrees to the T’s & C’s.

(UPDATE: A number of people are speculating that this is a biz-dev thing only for agreed partners and that it may not be using agreed standards, etc(eg here). I just want to be really clear: this is NOT A BIZ DEV DEAL, this is open to everyone. The launch partners are simple there to demonstrate the complete value at both ends and help MySpace test the implementation. And as mentioned in the press release, this is all using oAuth for authentication and will be working with DataPortability on standards.)

As a co-founder of the DataPortability Initiative I’m thrilled to be a part of this project and able to help guide it from the inside.

Caroline McCarthy of News.com has described this as “a huge deal” and of course I agree. In the media call she asked MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe whether Facebook would be able to participated and he responded:

“This project is open to any site out there that wants to work with us so we’re happy to work with Facebook if they want to join up with us on this project.”

This is not the same MySpace I took on as a client 6 months ago. Significant and exciting things are happening at MySpace and it’s great to be a part of it.

If you have comments or ideas and suggestions for things you want to see at MySpace, please let me know: bmetcalfe {at} myspace {dot} com

If you’re in LA cos you reside here, or down for the TechCrunch/PopSugar party tonight, you should definitely come out for the first Data Portability Meetup in LA:

Data Portability LA Meetup

April 11, 2008 7pm – 10pm

Blank Spaces,
5405 Wilshire Blvd,
Los Angeles,
California 90036

Upcoming.org - Google Map

Both myself and Chris Saad (founding members of the Data Portability Initiative) will be there, and we’re hoping representatives from a couple of major LA-based vendors will be in attendance too. Not to mention the grassroots tech scene as well.

Thanks to Crystal Williams, Michael Lambie and everyone else who have helped bring this together - you guys rock!

Please do add yourself to the Upcoming.org listing if you can make it!

Just a quick note to say that the MySpace Developer Platform, which went live to developers last month, is now live to ‘regular’ users too.

That means anyone can add an app to their MySpace profile or homepage.

Congrats to everyone in the team who’ve worked some looooooong hours to get this up. Well done everyone!

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a great overview of today’s announcement and the platform:

A few key points of differentiation between MySpace, other OpenSocial “containers” and Facebook are as follows:

• Apps on the Home page.
  I believe that one of the biggest reasons Facebook apps have such low user engagement numbers is because they can’t enter the key space of the user admin page. That’s where users live, not on their own public facing profile pages. MySpace is hoping to go so far as to create an “everyperson’s Netvibes/PageFlakes/MyYahoo” experience.
• Custom namespaces
  MySpace has a long list of custom namespaces that aren’t available in OpenSocial’s most basic structure. That’s the case with almost all OpenSocial implementations, we hear, and it will be interesting to see how real the promise of interoperability is.
• Synchronous communication
  It may not be XMPP but the MySpace app namespace ONLINE_FRIENDS appears to let app developers access the sub-list of a user’s friends who are actively online. Many social activities are best done in real time (like asking for money via Lending Club? maybe not) and we’ll be interested to see what apps make use of this option.
• OAuth support
  MySpace users are going to be happy to share their contacts and info from other applications off-site with apps on the MySpace platform because they’ll be able to do so securely. MySpace is about to become the biggest use-case of the oAuth authentication protocol, something many sites are scrambling to implement. Will app developers put this to use? We’ll see.

More on Read/WriteWeb.com and also on Mashable.

(Disclosure: I work with the MySpace Developer Platform team)

While I’m writing about new site launches, I also want to mention LearnHub, which went live to the public last week.

Last year, our good friends John and Malgosia Green returned from San Francisco to their native Toronto, Canada to realize their dream of establishing a social learning network.

What’s that, you might ask? Well, LearnHub describes itself as being “…for people who love learning and sharing knowledge with others”. So the social network element is about connecting people with mutual interests who want to shre knowledge and experience.

They already have a lot of experience in this area, having previously founded a learning management system site called Nuvvo (now defunct).

The site looks aesthetically stunning. The concept is great. I think they’re going to be very successful. Best of luck, guys!

Congratulations to Peter Nixey and Immad Akhund - two friends and fellow Brits - who’ve just publicly launched their Y-Combinator backed startup ClickPass (TechCrunch coverage here).

Sofia and I have been following their progress for some month, including sneak peeks and early uses of the product. And I have to say it really brings the benefits of OpenID to the mainstream - opening up all sorts of new possibilities.

Click pass is essentially made up of two constituent parts.

Firstly, the company offers a simple-yet-slick design patten for the federated authentication of the user. What I like about the design is that not only do ClickPass help their users login to a given site with OpenID, but they have also baked in simple support for a number of other popular OpenID providers too - such as AOL, Wordpress and LiveJournal (where it all began).

Rather than having to remember their full OpenID URL at either ClickPass or any of these other providers, the user simply has to enter their username and the ClickPass login widget automatically constructs the correct login url and sends the user on their way to authenticate at their chosen provider’s authentication home page.

Great stuff.

As a proponent of OpenID I really want to give props to Peter and Immad for taking the opportunity to make it easy for everyone regardless of whether they use ClickPass to authenticate or not.

The second aspect of the service is a dashboard style interface that reflects the various sites the user holds an OpenID relationship with. This creates an ideal home page opportunity as it’s so easy to dive straight into the sites you use.

There’s also a great monetization opportunity of using the interface to take advertising on this page to the next level. Rather than simply promoting the front page of their site, with the permission of the user an advertiser could create an account for their site upon the initial click through from the advert - using the OpenID credentials already authenticated on ClickPass.

This allows the site to immediately offer full utility to the user rather than having to encourage them to ‘cross the chasm’ and create an account (having already had to encourage them just to click on the advert).

I may be a little biased, as Peter and Immad are friends, but I really do think this is the best implementation of OpenID out there right now for ‘regular users’. I do think they need to bake in more anti-phishing mechanisms - such as displaying photos, key phrases or some other ’secret’ upon authentication. But these are easily done and I’m sure this is something they are both looking at.

Well done boys, good work!

During last week’s ETech Conference, I attended Lawrence Lessig’s talk on his new project ‘Change Congress‘. TorrentFreak picked up a key point Lessig made during the Q&A that proceeded the presentation.

“At a preview of his new Change Congress project at the ETech conference, the Creative Commons founder responded to a question about the US Pirate Party, saying “I’m skeptical of the utility of something like the Pirate Party in the United States.” He went on to comment about the naming, referring to the ‘honest business fighting illegitimate thieves’ battle that Hollywood portrays with “Call your party the Pirate Party, and you’ll reinforce that. The branding is not one that I would embrace here in the United States.”

Naturally, the Pirate Party of the US disagrees. “As a professor, he should know better than to advocate judging a book by it’s cover” says Andrew Norton, head of the US Pirate Party. “It’s also unusual that the man that fought Hollywood’s increase of copyright, should find fault with a party that only seeks to represent the general public, and what better title than the name that Hollywood is using for all citizens.” referring to a recent study, which suggested that everyone violates copyright, and are thus pirates, every day.”

I agree with Lessig in his point.

Both Sofia and I follow the endeavors of the Piratpartiet (Pirate Party) in Sofia’s native Sweden. It’s the first credible political movement that has started a serious conversation about copyright reform in a significant nation such as Sweden.

Lessig’s point that such as party would need to campaign under a different name are are valid for two reasons - the need for mainstream presentation in the US and the ability for smaller parties to win seats in parliament in countries which have proportional representation, such as Sweden.

Presentation and facade

Firstly, the US uses a singe-winner first-past-the-post electoral system, which is so two-party centric that minority parties have little involvement or impact upon the political system. You have to aim to go mainstream - at which point appearance and marketing become very important.

As geeks we often fail to see the importance of branding and packaging in modern life - especially amongst more ‘normal’ strands of society. If the Democrat party was called the “Big Banana Party” it would be unlikely to win much interest in the political scene.

In fact, just to use a less-crazy example, even with the same political manifesto I doubt the Democrat Party would see much success if it was called the “American Socialist Party” - because Americans don’t generally respond well to the word ’socialism’ in their politics.

To argue against that is frankly to demonstrate a lack of understanding of marketing and branding, or an ignorance to the importance of facade in US politics. Why do you think it’s only now, in 2008, that we finally have a female and a black man as candidates? Because presentation is important and even the left wing of America wasn’t ready to vote for each a candidate 10 years ago.

Its all about proportional representation

In Sweden the name “Piratpartiet” (Pirate Party) works not only because society is far more liberal but also because the country uses a multi-winnner proportional representation system. This means that even the parties with minority voting get to sit proportionally in parliament.

In the case of the Piratpartiet, it only needs one or two seats in order to achieve voting rights on legislative matters and have the opportunity to air it’s views in the parliament under such an unorthodox banner.

Why it won’t work in America

The American first-past-the-post system is certainly top-focused, with tertiary parties not only getting little room to maneuver but also scuppering similarly aligned parties when the population split their vote (such as a slight majority of the voting population voting for either the Democrats and the Greens - with neither party gaining majority and handing the Republicans the win).

The two main parties also remain highly corporate focused - and so for all these reasons I don’t believe such a political debate about copyright reform will ever take place in the US until significant momentum has occurred elsewhere in the world.

Not only do I agree with Lawrence Lessig that ‘The Pirate Party USA’ would be a poor choice of name for such a movement in North America, but I would go further and suggest that under the current American electoral system, any single-issue party has little chance of affecting change.

(disclosure: I work with MySpace on their platform)

Having just launched the MySpace Developer Platform, including support for OpenSocial, MySpace are holding the first of their MySpace devJam events next week: Saturday March 1st at MySpace San Francisco (upcoming).

devJams are MySpace’s take on popular events such as Yahoo!’s Hackday series and Google’s Hackathons. The day will kick-off with some tutorials and code walk-throughs led by the lead architects of the MySpace Developer Platform. Then after lunch it’s striaght down to good-old hacking, coding and devJammin’.

As you would expect they’ll be an opportunity at the end of the day to demo your app and perhaps even win some cool prizes.

But if you don’t get your app finished that day, MySpace will be holding a series of regular “Show-n-Tell Evenings” at MySpace San Francisco for you to come back to and ask questions of the MySpace Development Team and demo your app.

If you can’t make it to San Francisco on the 1st March, fear not as MySpace will be doing them all over the country world over the coming months. The next one is in Seattle, WA on the 15th March (Upcoming).

In the meantime, tell MySpace where you want the next devJams to be held!

MySpace devJam: San Francisco, March 1st

• Get your free ticket: http://myspace-devjam-sf.eventbrite.com/
• Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/439119/

MySpace devJam: Seattle, March 15th

• Get your free ticket: http://myspace-devjam-seattle.eventbrite.com/
• Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/439122/

[Blog post on MySpace Developer Platform blog]

You’d have to be under a pretty big rock not to have heard about the layoffs at Yahoo! today. Many people, from an Integrated Campaign Strategy Manager through to popular blogger Susan Mernit were ‘impacted’, as the internal memo was apparently worded. Even Brickhouse lost its head.

On the one hand, being given a pink slip is no doubt destabilizing and scary. However with Yahoo! on your resume and the rest of the industry still doing relatively well, I’m pretty sure most ex-Yahoo’s will find something to move onto.

And as one company downsizes another upsizes - and so I guess this is as good as any opportunity to help get the word out that MySpace is hiring like mad for it’s funky new San Francisco office in South Park.

Engineers, Product Managers, UI Designers, Biz Dev, Project Management… you name it. There are some sample job reqs, but to be honest if you’re looking for such positions I’d rather just put you in contact with the right people at MySpace because we all know that at this level it’s about getting good people on board as much as it is defining specific roles.

MySpace is doing some really interesting work. Some people I talk to seem to have pre-conceived notions about the company, which I understand. But I feel it’s worth re-evaluating. The Developer Platform that just launched is a leading example of the level of openness, transparency and conversation MySpace is seeking with its audience.

And just today I saw the designs of something truly amazing that will hit your screens in the coming months. Like ground-breaking stuff.

If you got laid off from Yahoo! today, or are concerned you might be next then why not at least check out what MySpace is up to? Of course that offer extends to anyone who’s getting bored somewhere and wants to feel the fire in their belly again, and work with others of the same ilk.

Please hit me up with an email and your resume - my email address at MySpace is bmetcalfe {at} myspace.com.

(disclosure, I work with MySpace - but that’s hopefully pretty evident!)

UPDATE… Note to journalists/reporters/pro-bloggers: I do not have any comment to make on the reports of discussions between Yahoo!/News Corp (parent company to MySpace) - nor would I be authorized to do so if I did. Please don’t email or call me on this!

Disclosure: I advise MySpace with the creation and execution of the developer platform

So, after months of work by an amazing + passionate team (and I genuinely mean that) the MySpace Developer Platform is very close to being launched - in fact it will go live on 5th Feb.

You can go sign up now at http://developer.myspace.com - that will not only generate you an email when the site goes live but also get you authorization for some other cool stuff too when the site goes live.

You need to sign up with the email address of your MySpace account (you do have a MySpace account, right?) and Ben’s insider tip here is to signup with the email address of a profile you want to use as the ‘owner’ of your app. If you have a freaky social life on MySpace but want to run a commercial app you might want to create a new profile.

I really can’t say much more other than to confirm it’s going to include Google OpenSocial, so if you’re already building OpenSocial apps then you’re in for a treat!

A long journey starts with a small step

I think everyone at MySpace knows that this is really just the beginning of an important road, one that others have already set out on - and I also hope that the community will appreciate that too when it launches… But I can’t tell you how committed and ‘fired up’ (if ever there was a buzz term for 2008, that’s it) people are at MySpace about this - both for the launch and on-going as a key part of the proposition.

Speaking from a personal perspective, I can appreciate that in the past MySpace has not always been perceived as playing as well in this space as it could - esp around turning off widgets for unclear reasons, etc. However, in the run up to this launch I’ve sensed a very different approach - one that understands the importance of playing well and being a good actor in the community.

Someone on TechCrunch asked why this project was important when “… developers have always been able to embed things like games and music into Myspace via Flash?”. The reason this is important is because it empowers the developer with contextual information abut the viewer and the owner of the viewed profile. It also gives the gives the green-light and encouragement to put apps on profiles - something that was slightly mirky ground before.

You can also check out Mashable, TC and GigaOm.

Please go sign up now…!

Last week was one of the roughest I’ve experienced in my entire adult life.

At the start of the week I became poisoned and had a severe allergic reaction to what we believe were gasses emanating from a new memory foam mattress Sofia and I purchased a few days prior. It took the rest of the week to recover.

Sofia was totally fine (no effects at all), although I ended up in the Emergency Room of Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, San Francisco.

The allergic reaction itself was frightening. My throat swelled up and my chest went tight from bronchial dilation. My face also felt like it was on fire, and my arms and chest came up with rashes - all from the histamines rushing through my body. Thank you to the wonderful Giselle Kennedy (of Seesmix fame) for taking me home (the severe reaction took place at Seesmic).

Sofia later took me to the ER after I didn’t respond fully to a large dose to anti-histamines we administered at home.

The days that followed were some of the lowest I’ve ever experienced. My cognitive abilities were severely diminished, giving me a whole new appreciation for the ‘brain fog’ my father experienced on his year-long beta-interferon treatment for Hepatitis C. I had to sign on to a doctor here in San Francisco for post-ER follow-up and I couldn’t even fill out the new patient form they gave me.

I also couldn’t stay in my apartment whilst the mattress was still there as it was still off-gassing. I can’t tell you enough how grateful I am to Matt Mullenweg for letting me crash in his apartment whilst we waited for Macy’s to collect the mattress. Thanks again for everything Matt, and Glenda.

Sadly, this isn’t the first allergic reaction I’ve had and so I’ve also been prescribed an Epipen which I must now carry with me for the rest of my life. In the event I do have another allergic reaction and my throat swells up, I can administer to myself a life-saving dose of epinephrine (adrenaline).

You can also watch more in a Seesmic I recorded during the week (I was still pretty unwell whilst I filmed this, which accounts for the slurring!):

Today, Sunday night, I’m feeling about 95% better and getting ready to fly down to LA tomorrow for my first day back at work. It’s been a frightening, low and expensive week (I’m insured, but I have a high deductible plus the lost earnings).

But I’m pleased to have made it to the other side and hopefully back to my normal self. My apologies if I haven’t returned your email - I’ve got quite a bit to catch up on.