That’s where social networks like MySpace, hi5, and orkut come into play. While Facebook might be the largest social network and the most used in North America, MySpace still retains a loyal set of users. Networks like hi5 and orkut maintain strong regional networks, with others like Vkontakte commanding small, but extremely engaged regional users.

Facebook is effectively a ‘me too’ developer arena, with an aggressive and unfriendly referee in Facebook Corporate. Most of the spamish tools used by Zynga and Playfish to grow their networks during the last redesign renaissance are gone now. Wall posts? Gone. Stream Posts with lots of images and spammy links? Gone. Notifications? On the way out baby. Facebook is attempting to detatch themselves from developers that helped increased the retention of their platforms by reducing branding and making it difficult for new developers to grow their audiences. With the introduction of Facebook payments, the writing is on the wall for companies like offerpal and trialpay as well.

So, what’s a developer to do? Social networks arn’t going away, and there’s still money to be made developing for other platforms that are looking to lure developers of A-list apps away from Facebook. MySpace is trying to do exactly that with a revamped API and a development contest aimed at giving developers something else to playwith on the platform. To be honest, there are some fairly interesting ideas in the streaming apis, borrowed from what Twitter is up to lately with its streaming API. It’s a huge waste of time and money, tho. The MySpace API’s are poorly documented and don’t really focus around what developers need to pull from the network on a regular basis (Friends, Userdata, Viral Channels). What’s worse, all of the MySpace API interactions are governed by what must be the worst authentication system ever imagined in Google’s OAuth for Opensocial.

Just look at the work flow for this beast of an authentication system. Wanna get some information from the user? You need ten steps to make that happen. Five full request / response cycles to make anything happen if the user isn’t authenticated. MySpace will let you skip one of those cycles if you’re making the request from an already authenticated user within one of their application pages, but you’re still going to walk through the overly complicated process of authentication to do almost anything. You could use the MySpace SDK for most platforms, and they do a great job of abstracting away all of this OAuth complexity, but as a developer, I should be able to look at the calls and understand how they work immediately.

Developers should be somewhat afraid of things that are black box implementations of anything, and while the MySpace SDK isn’t exactly black box, it isn’t intuitive either. It takes a real time investment to understand any call made to the api that involves OAuth. What’s worse is that it’s needless complexity. Twitter’s API uses tried and true authentication headers to prove identity. Easy, understood, you know what’s going on immediately and should something break, how you can roll up your sleeves to see what’s wrong.

Most developers who work on the MySpace platform won’t take the time to understand it because of the massive bloat attached to it. It’s too far gone now for any proper change with the MySpace API, not because it can’t be changed, but because there is no culture in place to change it.

Want developers to work and create for your platform? Get out of your own way.