Filed under: Internet, Macintosh, Web services, Shareware, Social Software
Spyder - Offline MySpace client for Mac OS X
by Chris Brentano Jan 21st 2007 at 6:00PM
If you are a reader of our sister (or brother) site TUAW, you may have seen this covered a little while back. Spyder is a handy offline MySpace client for Mac OS X by Michael K. Link that you may find useful if you are a hardcore MySpace user. Its clean interface, which seems to be inspired by a little bit iTunes 7, a little bit Delicious Library, allows you to manage your social network with relative ease. A demo/free version is available which handles about 70% of all functions available on the MySpace web site (you can't send friend requests, for example) but if you pay for a license all features are enabled.
It's definitely a clever application - since there's no published MySpace API (as far as I know), what I presume it's doing is making the HTTP requests and crawling the document to pull the necessary data (screen scraping). The $34.95 price tag may turn all but the most serious MySpace users away (or folks who can't handle dealing with some of the more, ahem, 'customized' profiles). At the moment only MySpace is supported by Spyder, but the developer has promised Facebook and Flickr support in the future.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Parker said 7:07PM on 1-21-2007
What a great idea! And Facebook support will be sweet. But I can't help but worry that, since there is no public API and all of the queries are handled unofficially, all MySpace or the other sites need to do is change a couple variable names and the whole program is broken. If it were free software that would be fine, but I wouldn't pay $35 for something so fragile.
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ToddZ said 2:32PM on 1-22-2007
I'd rather see MySpace users either switch services or put pressure on Tom and his goons to improve their abominable user experience -- and/or release an API so others can do so properly.
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Adora said 7:23PM on 1-23-2007
Other tools have been built before to integrate with Myspace like this...I remember trying a crossposting wordpress plugin...but as far as I know no project has ever been willing to keep up with Myspace's changes for very long. It is possible that Spyder's author came up with a method reliable enough to go commercial, but I still wouldn't expect it to be consistently stable (without even factoring in the inherent instability when interfacing with Myspace directly).
:: Lisa
:: adora [at] techslut [.] net
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Ranajay Sen said 9:57PM on 1-23-2007
This is probably not the place to ask (being a Mac article), but does anybody know of a Windows application that can do about the same, or even better, integrate with facebook?
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asf said 5:48PM on 2-16-2007
BUYER BEWARE!!! Nothing works right. Looks like it would be a nice program until you use it for a couple days, messages you have sent "disapear" and are never delivered. So many problems, I can't believe the money I spent for a piece of software that is UNUSABLE. I was so excited to find something like this for mac, I sure as heck "jumped the gun". BEWARE
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