MySpace is finally ready to launch its OpenSocial-based development platform. According to Mashable, developers can now submit applications for review and the first set of approved applications will be available to users on March 13! In January, I talked about MySpace and OpenSocial in my post Facebook Platform vs. OpenSocial. Although it was announced last November, Google’s OpenSocial partners are only starting to launch their platform initiatives with 3 large sites (MySpace, Google’s Orkut and Hi5) launching over the next month! MySpace’s Jim Benedetto did a great job at the O’Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference outlining MySpace’s upcoming platform’s strategy.

I also mentioned that as a service provider to content providers, Grouptivity is about providing publishers with increased traffic through improved and widespread distribution. Social networks (like MySpace and Facebook) are ideal environments that can leverage online content sharing tools and services to help publishers reach a wider audience and allow users to consumer and share “social news”.

A growing number of content publishers, including both media companies and upstarts, are still trying to figure out their social networking strategy as part of their overall social media strategies! One of the things Grouptivity does is help publisher develop and deploy their “social news” strategy.  By providing a real-world gauge of what content users are actually sharing, Grouptivity enables content publishers to get real-time visibility into who is sharing what. Deploying this capability, in the context of a social network like Facebook or MySpace, gives users the ability to actively or passively share news that is interesting to them and it gives publisher a platform for increasing distribution, readership, and traffic!

When Facebook launched its f8 application platform it experienced a 37% increase in growth and the number of available application quickly grew to over 10,000 by the end of year. It is going to be interesting to watch MySpace’s OpenSocial platform roll out as far as the number of applications being developed and if they do indeed bring users back to the site.