giants playing catchup.. and its not google vs microsoft

Thanks to Lalit who pointed to me late last night that myspace plans to launch their platform to 3rd party application developers.. playing catch up to facebook and curbing the popularity. Boy, did they move fast. No questions, almost all existing facebook developers will port their apps on myspace and google (orkut) for that matter. Some of them which were filling the gap for facebook (vs myspace) might not have much of a choice, but within couple of months, muyspace would have caught up with facebook in terms of developer attention. Then the actual race begins.. who can keep developers tempted to their platform aka who can maximize returns for developers. In any scenario, developers win.

But what about users. Do they win? More coming up on that in later post.

Update:

Now several sources claim the above rumor was in fact just a rumor and that myspace is not yet ready to go public with their API's. Makes sense. Its not easy and it really seemed that was very fact of them to have caught up.