Just like Facebook in May, MySpace announced Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco plans to open its platform for developers to build applications on top of the popular social networking site.

"We are going to create a sandbox for two million beta users and our developers," Chris DeWolfe, co-founder and CEO of MySpace, said. "The idea there is to make sure the applications are safe and secure and pass a certain level of value to get on the site. We expect the majority of these applications will make it onto MySpace."

Because MySpace waited out on opening its platform, it could learn from Facebook's problems and mistakes in doing so. For example, MySpace will roll out its program in several stages to enable them to deal with problems which might arise one at a time.

Apart from the above mentioned sandbox for two million beta users, who will have advance access to the system for about two-three months, over the next couple of weeks MySpace will release a directory of existing third party widgets to help users find good content to add to their MySpace page.

MySpace's applications will also be more developer friendly, which means MySpace will provide a control page for developers to essentially own, that in turn can contain advertisements whose revenues will belong 100 percent to developers.

"MySpace can help them sell advertising on that page," said DeWolfe. "The developers will own all the inventory on that page."

Comscore reports that MySpace had 55 million unique visitors in August, with Facebook pulling in 14 million unique visitors during the same time.

Top MySpace executives Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson have struck rich deals to stay with the company, which belongs to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. since 2005. DeWolfe and Anderson each will get about $15 million to stay for two years, LA Times reports.

From now on, the users of the famous social networking site MySpace.com will be able to communicate through voice, thanks to the new partnership between Skype and MySpace. Yesterday MySpace unveiled MySpaceIM with Skype, a hybrid between MySpace IM client and Skype. The partnership will also enable users to link their MySpace profiles and photos or avatars to their accounts on Skype. Both products will be available to users starting in November.

During its F8 conference in May, Facebook announced a major change, Facebook Platform, a new development platform that enables companies and engineers to integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users. For example, Facebook jointly developed with Amazon.com an application called “Book Reviews”. The application will permit Facebook users to write and display book reviews on their profile pages. Facebook users can then click on the “Buy at Amazon” button to go to Amazon.com and complete their purchase.

But Amazon isn’t the only company that is ready to take advantage of Facebook’s new features. Microsoft’s Popfly is a web-based tool that gives Facebook users the power to create applications and add them to their profiles with no programming at all. For instance, users can create and embed mashups of websites directly in their profiles.