After a brief overview of some of the events leading up to the launch of the MySpace Developer Platform, Allen Hurff discusses the efforts of MySpace to build relationships with the developer community – among them soliciting a huge list of developer requirements and creating opportunities for developers to build their own revenue from applications. He describes MySpace’s collaboration with Google to create OpenSocial and their continuing support for open standards. To demonstrate the opportunities for developers, he presents engagement metrics on usage of the top four applications on MySpace, with Own Your Friend at the top of the list.
He touches on the API that are available to developers in addition to OpenSocial and how security and privacy concerns are being addressed. He wraps up by listing a half dozen future enhancements to the platform which will make it even more accessible and appealing to the developer community. But underlying all this relationship building with developers is the theme of reasonable constraints set in place to protect the MySpace user experience.
Allen Hurff is the senior vice president of engineering at MySpace. He has worked at the world’s most popular social networking and lifestyle portal since it was a privately owned start-up. In his position, Allen oversees the engineering and the overall development direction of MySpace as it matures into a company with global reach. Allen joined MySpace in March 2005 with only 12 developers still located in Santa Monica, California. Allen has grown the engineering and quality assurance organization to over 250 employees now located in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Atlanta, London, and Australia.Before MySpace, Allen worked at TRW, Unisys, AltaVista, Shopping.com, Experian, and private consulting. Hurff continues to be a key influential player in the ongoing success and growth of MySpace.
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