It would be the largest scale relaunch of a website of its size. MySpace, the social networking site, will change its home page, navigation, profile editing, search, and MySpaceTV player facilities. Other changes will come during the summer.

“This is more than a face-lift; we’re changing the way people interact with the site and with brands,” MySpace said.

The site’s search engine will get a face-lift. MySpace will use the Java-based Apache Lucene text search engine library, marking the first time MySpace has officially contributed to the open-source community, the company said. MySpace joined Google’s OpenSocial platform in November.

On the MySpaceTV front, the site will add a scrubber, time stamp, volume memory, updated menu system, and greater functionality to its new player. The player, which will use Flash 9, will initially be released on all of MySpaceTV.com, with embedding capability to follow shortly thereafter.

MySpace is routinely criticized by users and observers for a layout that many consider visually messy. Its members have many options to alter their profile pages, such as changing their background color, adding hyperactive animations, using fonts of many sizes and colors and plastering them with videos and photo slideshows.

Source: PCMag

Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites. The new tool is going to compete with data portability crowd like Facebook Connect from Facebook or Data Availability from MySpace.

Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.

The reason these companies are are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties), ” said TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington.

The key for all the data portability efforts (check out the DataPortability Project) is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Although, Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet.

Source: TechCrunch

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds. The APIs will be interoperable with any social network service that supports them, including on sites such as Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Social Networking hosts agreed to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs. OpenSocial does not have its own markup language unlike Facebook. The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

It is to be seen how much OpenSocial is leveraged to create mashups. It is good effort to keep a close eye on.