MySpace won’t die. Good. Competition breeds innovation and if social networks are to continue to become more and more useful then a somewhat healthy MySpace is simply going to keep the cog wheels turning in the otherwise spiderweb filled heads of talented engineers. MySpace introduced applications awhile back and there is now a pretty ample number, although nothing close to what Facebook has. I suppose there’s something to be said for being a day late and a dollar short, eh?
Most of the applications, as with Facebook, aren’t that useful. Games to help you waste time and quizzes to help you inform your friends and coworkers that you haven’t stepped out in the sunlight in far too long. But there is a specific application that anyone with an RSS feed that wants people to see it might find interesting (after all according to Alexa.com, MySpace is still the 18th ranked website in the world). The RSS Reader application, by Ideamesh, Inc can be used to add a blog or anything else that can be aggregated through a public RSS feed, to your MySpace page. It’s pretty easy to use and provides a quick and easy application box to show the feed.
This RSS reader isn’t everything you might want though. As far as I can tell, it only supports a single stream. It has options for reformatting text and links that are displayed, but not a lot. It doesn’t have any features for limiting feeds, although that is something you can usually do with the path to the feed if you want to.
But it is free, it is somewhat useful and the application framework that MySpace has introduced is a great step in the right direction to perhaps help MySpace to slow their slide into oblivion. Either way it’s nice to finally have a little more integration across all the sites out there, even if MySpace continues to drop in the rankings…