RoadsAfar

I’m happy to announce that my new Facebook application, SpaceLift, has gone live. SpaceLift allows Facebook users to browse any public profile on MySpace from within Facebook while converting the profile to the wrinkle-free Facebook layout. We’re hoping to reduce world-wide exposure to animated GIFs by 10% by the end of the year.

It’s still “Pending Approval” so it can’t be searched for in the Facebook Application Directory yet. Fortunately, since you are reading this, you can go there directly and start browsing MySpace.

Writing and launching a Facebook application has been an easy and pleasurable experience so far. We’ve gotten a decent amount of press from the likes of Mashable, Valleywag, and even a French and German blog.

Enough blathering. Go forth and make MySpace a cleaner place. Add SpaceLift.

So it is no secret from my last post that I’m not a big MySpace fan. To work on the Facebook application that I’ve been cranking away on, I had to sign up for a MySpace account and set up a profile. I found MySpace even more repulsive through this experience. And yet it is enormously popular.

What would happen if you could somehow bridge the gap between MySpace and Facebook? This is something I’ve been thinking about and hacking on for the last week. And I’m just about ready to share my work with the world. It could be pretty interesting.

So I started tinkering with the Facebook Application API just last night and was surprised how quickly one can get an application up and running. The documentation on Facebook’s developer wiki and website are remarkably complete given that this service has only been available for a short time. Facebook really gets it. They have a great network with a lot of users, but they also realize that attracting developers is very important. The Facebook Platform goes a long way towards making life easy for potential developers.

MySpace, on the other hand, is a very different story. The Facebook Application that I’m writing, which I’ll talk more about later, is pulling data from MySpace. It is absolutely appalling the amount of disarray that makes up MySpace profiles. Not only does MySpace not offer any sort of public API, but the profiles themselves are a mishmash of haphazard CSS and HTML that make the US Government look efficient and lean. I’m shocked that they are still the largest social network out there at around 100 million users compared to Facebook’s 20 million. Even so, I’m still placing my bets on Facebook.