NEW YORK: The online community MySpace is introducing tools for developing games, media-sharing features and other programs that better integrate with the Internet’s leading social-networking site.
Wednesday’s announcement follows a May decision by its smaller rival, Facebook, to open its platform to developers, a move that has proven to be a boon for music-sharing startup iLike.com, photo-sharing service Slide Inc and countless other companies.
Those applications, in turn, have helped make Facebook even more popular, although it still ranks as the second most trafficked social network behind MySpace.
The MySpace Developer Platform will be formally launched next Tuesday.
Although developers will have all the tools they need to create and test programs, MySpace has yet to announce a start date to let them be integrated.
The company said the program should result in innovations in how friends can connect and communicate.
MySpace already has informally allowed

developers to create interactive applications known as ‘widgets’.
In fact, the photo-sharing service Photo-bucket’s widget became so popular that MySpace’s parent company bought it for about $300 million.
By creating a developers program, MySpace plans to give programmers “deeper access” to the site and the ability to “build richer applications as part of it,” said Amit Kapur, MySpace’s chief operating officer.
Kapur said the company would also help developers earn advertising money through their applications.
MySpace officials also hinted at rules and procedures that could help the company avoid the kind of controversy Facebook has encountered with Scrabulous, an online version of the word game Scrabble and one of Facebook’s most popular applications.
The Scrabble game’s owners, Hasbro Inc
and Mattel Inc, are trying to shut it down
and have jointly issued cease-and-desist
notices to four parties they didn’t publicly
name.

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