MySpace has confirmed that Josh Berman, COO, will leave the social networking site to take on a ’senior role’ at Slingshot Labs, a new venture backed by News Corp, whose mission will be to incubate internet startups. Rumours of the move had been circulating since last week when Chris DeWolfe, the MySpace founder, told the New York Times about the incubator.

MySpace also said it would brief reporters next week on details of its bid to open up to outside developers. The FT revealed in June that MySpace that the popular social networking site hoped to take a page from Facebook, its smaller rival, by launching its own equivalent of the Facebook Platform. In November, MySpace announced that it had joined forces with Google on OpenSocial, an open alternative to Facebook’s platform.

Now that MySpace is preparing to launch its platform, internet-watchers will be looking for further details about the kinds of incentives it will offer to developers. Facebook set a high bar by allowing its developers to advertise freely within their apps - just not on the Facebook home page. The pressure will be on MySpace to follow suit.

January 31st, 2008 in Uncategorised | Permalink