Best Practices For My Space Apps. This power point will give you a snapshot of all the features and tools MySpace Apps Platform offers it's developers to grow their applications and engage with their users.

1. Best Practices for MySpace AppsJuly, 2009 May X, 2009

2. Overview This document covers a number of best practices for developers building Apps for the MySpace Open Platform. It covers: Growing Your User Base Driving Engagement Developer Guidelines

3. Growing Your Audience Invitations The most effective channel for growing your user base Up to 20 friends can be invited at once Most companies create their own friend selector that passes the recipients to our Invite dialog We recommend that you filter the friends list to only include: Users who do not have the App installed Put Top Friends and Online friends at the top of the list Only include regular user profiles (no bands, comedians, etc.) Provide an option to select multiple friends, 20 friends or all friends User’s can add additional names in the To: bar Test variations of the invite message Keep in mind that user’s can block receiving invites from your App

4. Growing Your Audience App Activities App activities was recently expanded to show activities to all friends, thus creating a viral channel Activities must be previewed and published manually by the end user. Have a call-to-action to the viewers of your activities, which leads users to an OpenCanvas page that contains an add App button An OpenCanvas page allows the developer to personalize based on the user’s ID, display name and public photos Use the OpenCanvas to further interest the user and have a clear call-to-action to add the App Parameters can be passed from the activity to the OpenCanvas that provide context to the App Status Updates Using our server-to-server REST APIs allow you to update the user’s status with a link to the canvas It must be clear to the user that they are updating their status

5. Growing Your Audience You don’t have to rely on our Add App link on a canvas. Provide your own Add App link that points to your canvas with the parameter autoInitiateInstall=true, which will bring up the Add App dialog

6. Growing Your Audience Unlike other social networks, MySpace Apps can have a more persistent and upfront presence on the user profile with modules With OpenSocial you can differentiate between the userviewing the profile box or a visitor/friend viewing it Have different calls-to-action Personalize Integrate personalization and animation to make yourprofile box standout and be engaging Flash can be used on profile modules Make sure your profile box does not have a significantnegative impact on profile page loadtime

7. Growing Your Audience Users can post to blogs, bulletins and profiles, which are one to many channels. Apps can also send one to one messages to the user’s inbox Only one user can be mailed to at a time Posting to a comment is like sending a message to the user, but it’s publicly viewable Users can set their comments to be approved before being displayed All these options require user confirmation and are not available as server-to-server APIs Blogs, messages and bulletins can contain links to the canvas and Add App page, and can contain externally hosted images

8. Growing Your Audience Once your viral channels are ready, invest in sponsorship in the App gallery and other parts of the site to fully launch your App Leverage our Hypertargeting and optimization capabilities to target the right audience with the right call-to-action Use autoInitiateInstall=1 to shorten the add App process Use tracking parameters passed in the install callback to analyze conversion rates for various ad units

9. Driving Engagement App to user notifications can be a powerful engagement channel. They can sent to any user that has the App installed. They can be invoked in the App via OpenSocial or from the server via REST APIs. REST must be used for bulk messaging. Notifications should have clear call-to-actions using action buttons. They can include a media item, such as a picture of any user that has the App installed to engage the user or a picture uploaded to an album You can upload pictures using to be released 0.9 REST APIs for photos

10. Driving Engagement The user homepage (UHP) module is a great way to draw the user back into the App Include in the UHP module personalized and timely updates of what’s happening in the App Flash can be used in the UHP module to make it more interactive Also make sure the UHP module does not negatively impact page load time

11. Developer Guidelines Using IFRAME versus OpenSocial for your surfaces IFRAME makes it easier to keep your App update, however there is more heavy lifting in terms of invoking OpenSocial methods for Invites and Activity Publishing and REST calls Use IFPC library for communicating to OpenSocial from your IFRAME App Our SDKs cam simplify using the REST APIs Flash can either be uploaded to our CDN or served from your CDN We now support the appropriate crossdomain.xml permissions for non-MySpace hosted Flash Apps Leverage install and uninstall callbacks to track acquisition and churn The URL of the page from which the App was installed is passed as a parameter in the callback Leverage appParams and appData to pass state from modules or canvas pages to other canvas pages Make use of adjustHeight to dynamically adjust the IFRAME on canvas to fit your content. In the developer website, don’t login as the App and then try to create a new App

12. Getting Support Stay up to date with best practices at http://developer.myspace.com Follow our developer blog at http://developer.myspace.com/community/blogs/ Email developerrelations@myspace-inc.com Documentation: http://wiki.developer.myspace.com MySpaceID SDK’s: http://lnk.ms/00rb2 Follow us on Twitter @myspacedevteam