October 17, 2007 8:35 PM PDT

MySpace platform opening up. Finally

Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, on stage with his boss of two years, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, finally announced to the world at the Web 2.0 Summit tonight that MySpace will have an open platform "within a couple of months."

After the platform opens to developers, it will open to a subset of users, about two million, to see if the "sandbox" that keeps that platform safe is reliable.

Before we all get MySpace apps, we'll get a catalog of widgets that we can add to your pages. Widgets aren't apps, though.

Of course, there are platforms and there are platforms. It wasn't clear at all how much of the MySpace social database will be exposed to developers, nor what data MySpace will let developers export to non-MySpace pages.

DeWolfe did say, however, that developers will be able to monetize their apps, and that MySpace perhaps will help them sell advertising.

L to R: Chris DeWolfe, Rupert Murdoch, John Battelle

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe.

Topics:: Developer tools,; Social network and groups

Tags:: Web2Summit,; MySpace

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