MySpace Allows Users to Share Profiles with other Sites

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MySpace aims to give users the power to decide to share their personal information like pictures, videos, and text on third party services. They are going to support web services owned by Yahoo, Photobucket, eBay and Twitter. Like MySpace, the photo-sharing site Photobucket is a unit of News Corp.

The "Data Availability" move makes MySpace open to working with arch-rival Facebook, which is the second largest social-networking site with 109 million unique visitors, after MySpace which has 117 million.

"MySpace no longer operates as an isolated island on the Internet. The walls around the garden are coming down," said MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe.

"We, alongside our data availability launch partners, are pioneering a new way for the global community to integrate their social experiences Web-wide."

MySpace members will be able to select which personal details to transfer using mini-applications installed on partner websites, so that they don't have to re-enter all that information again.

Altogether, the participating sites have 150 million users and reach 85 percent of the Internet market in the United States.

"We believe that the more open and the more social the Internet becomes the better it is for MySpace," DeWolfe said during a conference call with news reporters.

"We are happy to work with Facebook if they want to join up with us on this project, as with any group that wants to work with us."

Microsoft already owns 1.6 percent of Facebook, following a $240 million investment last year, which valued the social networking site at $15 billion.