Practical Entrepreneur

One of the most mind boggling aspects of the MySpace Developer platform is their “Application Approval” process. In short, when you create a new application and want to make it live, you “publish” it which means somebody at MySpace  gets notified, installs the application, and plays with it. Then they check the application profile and home views (basically stuff that the application puts on your profile, etc) and if all is to their liking, they bless your application and normal users can see the app.

In my experience it takes between 24 to 96 hours to get somebody from MySpace to look at an application and make a judgment. On their forums I have seen horror stories about applications that have been in pending state (from the time you publish to the time they look at it) for more than a few weeks but I haven’t personally experienced it (thank god!).

This approval process is definitely costly both for the application developers and MySpace. MySpace has to have people on staff that basically just install applications, test them out and make approval decisions. Basically MySpace is helping you outsource your QA team (and them some – see below) and foots that bill.

It’s also costly for the developer because MySpace Approval Team rejects submitted applications multiple times, in each round disclosing some of the areas they are not please with. So, from the time you think your open social application is ready to go to the time it makes it to real users it could take between a few days up to weeks depending on your luck and complexity of the application.

It even gets worst. Every time you update something in your application code (say you decide to make that navigation bar purple from blue!) MySpace flags your application for re-approval and a human being looks at it again! I am really curious how much this whole thing is costing them. They are not making that much money so they better get on some cost cutting!

So you might wonder what is their approval process like. MySpace says they check to see if the application meets their Terms of Service. But in my experience they look for these categories

• Application Works
• Application References External Scripts
• Application Uses OpenSocial
• Application Impedes Browser Functionality???
• Application Makes MySpace Tester Happy?
• Application Satisfies MySpace Tester’s Expected Pointing System (for games only!)
• Application “is Valuable”?
• Application…

Basically it’s a very subjective process that really doesn’t add any value to the platform, MySpace user experience or anything close to that. It simply costs MySpace and application developers time and money! There is nothing in the approval process that market forces (i.e., MySpace users) can’t weed out. I really wonder what would have happened if Facebook tried to do something this backwards with their platform. In my opinion this just proves how different MySpace mentality is from a typical “technology company”. If you ask any tech company about moderation/approval/policing they would all say we let our users help us with it. Let’s develop some technology that users can flag “bad” behavior and we punish the common offenders! But MySpace likes the police state route better.

Just to give you an idea about how the police state if MySpace works, I am posting a few “official” rejection emails that I have receieved from them in the course of past couple of weeks. It makes for a fun reading. These are verbatim MySpace comments with identifiable pieces taken out (replaced with all caps placeholders such as LINK1)

Your application does not have any meaningfull functionality. Their is one problem with your application (when clicked on “LINK” your application has some formatting problems) Please try to add some useful functionality to your application, fix formatting problem and resubmit your application

In your application after passing the links “LINK1 and LINK2″ a link is open “LINK3″, which redirect the user to add/remove page and impede the browser functionality. Secondly, when a visitor comes to view a user’s profile who has your application installed ( visitor – user without app; user – user with app),and click on the link “LINK4″ this link redirect the user to add/remove page, which is ok but impede the browser functionality

the transition between the canvas and install page impedes browser functionality as it stalls and doesn’t allow the user to use the back button, but if you press it fast enough in repetition, then it is accomplished.  So please complete the functionality.

There are still some functional difficulties with your application. When one user votes another user, the former user gets a point added in the POINT-SYSTEM, when only the latter user should be getting the points.

The application is working but partially. The meter does not go beyond 5 even if the user wins the polls several times and neither does the comment change for the user who is winning. So please review this part of your application