MySpace officials say they are satisfied with the amount of developer involvement with the platform, for which about 8,000 applications have been built.

"We're continuing to see great traction," said Gerardo Capiel, who was recently hired to be vice president of product management for the MySpace Open Platform.

But by contrast, external developers have built more than 52,000 applications for Facebook, which launched its platform in May 2007.

MySpace's decision to support a variety of open standards, such as , and , has made the process of building the platform "iterative," an approach developers have approved of, Capiel said. The OAuth protocol for user authentication, the OpenID user-identity framework and the OpenSocial set of common APIs for social-networking applications are works in progress.

The other side of that argument is that hitching its wagon to open technologies that are still very much in flux, in particular the Google-backed OpenSocial, has probably prevented MySpace from building up the platform more quickly, said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.