News Corp's MySpace, currently the world's largest online social network, said it will allow outside developers further access to its service to counter the growth of rival Facebook.
"We are opening our platform in the next couple of months," said MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe, confirming months of speculation that MySpace would follow in the footsteps of Facebook.
Privately-held Facebook had surged to a strong second place in the social network world ever since it opened its site a year ago beyond an original base of college students, and started allowing independent software makers to build applications for users and profit from it.
While MySpace remains the leader with nearly 110 million users, Facebook's rapid growth to over 47 million members has made it a new media darling, with media reports pegging its potential value to investors as high as $15 billion.
For four years MySpace has allowed users to embed features from other Web sites by pasting bits of code on their MySpace pages. But Facebook's open call to developers has already attracted 6,000 independent applications to its site.
DeWolfe said he was seeking to create a far more lucrative environment for outside developers on MySpace than currently exists on Facebook, where so far advertising opportunities for independent application developers are limited.
Software programmers will be able to control key aspects of how features like photos or user authentication work, allowing them to build more complex Web services than the restrictive approach MySpace has employed to date with outsiders.
Importantly, the company plans to give developers control over advertising that runs on the Web pages they create to host new services on MySpace. "There is going to be paid revenue opportunities for all the developers," DeWolfe said.
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