MySpace is announcing this morning that it will become an OpenID authenticating party and offer developers a deeper level of access to user data than was previously available.

As Facebook prepares to mark the one year anniversary of its heralded application platform and the new iPhone App Store lures developers with groundbreaking features and customers willing to pay for applications - competition for the attention of the developer community is heating up. Once again, when platforms compete for developers - users win.

MySpace announced today that it will authenticate users for third party sites that support OpenID. It's not clear how this will work yet, MySpace user profile URLs aren't authenticating and there hasn't been any mention of OpenID on the developers blog today, but we hope that usability won't be an issue here as it has often been for the OpenID world. MySpace now joins AOL and Yahoo! as major providers of OpenID accounts.

Initially MySpace will not act as a relying party, meaning you can't log into MySpace using a Yahoo! OpenID, for Read the full article