October 17th, 2007
Web 2.0 Summit: Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfe
Rupert Murdoch and his employee Chris DeWolfe, co-founder of MySpace, took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this evening. During the interview conducted by conference co-host John Battelle, DeWolfe said that the MySpace platform is opening up in the next few months, including a sandbox for two million beta users and the developer community. “We want to make sure the applications and safe and secure. We are taking a more measured approach,” DeWolfe said. He didn’t mention Facebook, but the move to open the platform is in part a response to the successful Facebook Platform.
“Facebook is pretty cool, like a utility, whereas we are more media, connecting people with different culture and interests around the world. It’s not just looking up friends,” Murdoch said about the rival social network. DeWolfe agreed. “One of things we are constantly looking at is that we have competitors around the world.” Beside Bebo, Orkut and others, DeWolfe said MySpace has a local competitor in every country, and in addition to that Yahoo, AOL and MSN are trying to have social networks.
The MySpace platform will have a set of APIs and markup language for developing applications that run within the MySpace environment. As Facebook plans to do, MySpace will let users categorize friends as family, business, etc. In addition, the company is also developing a catalog for MySpace widget in the next few weeks. See more on TechCrunch.
Murdoch was asked about Google. “We have good relationship with Google, and we have competitors everywhere.. We watch them all with respect,” Murdoch said. Battelle probed whether Murdoch views Google as threat to News Corp. “It is a threat and a friend. It’s a threat in the sense that all information providers are a threat to all media.”
Battelle asked Murdoch how the Dow Jones acquisition was going. “I don’t know. I haven’t paid for it yet. We”ll get it sometime in December. It’s a lock,” he said. He said he wants to add more international news and major coverage of arts, fashion and culture for the Wall Street Journal.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
