Myspace trackers early on had two issues:

First, people wanted to see who was looking at them, but couldn’t. A gallery of pictures of people that looked at you is way more interesting than a list of usernames or a list of IP numbers. Some claimed there was a tracker that could get pictures but Myspace shut it down. You can imagine why a script downloading/hotlinking that many pictures would get blocked.

Second, identity. How could you ever associate the person’s IP with their username in the first place? You need a username to get a picture, but without a username all you can do is guess at a general geographic location. So early trackers asked people to volunteer their username. Once your username was in the tracker database, then with cookies and/or IP tracking you could vitually “follow” that person’s activities around Myspace. Also you could trick people into identifying themselves by sending them a note with a hidden image file to capture their IP address an/or drop a cookie into their browser. But that’s assuming you know who to send the image to in the first place. This works if you have a “hunch” such and such person might be looking at you regularly, but doesn’t tell you anything about total strangers or people surfing behind proxy servers and/or blocking cookies.

The bottom line? Some data is out there, but more people volunteering their username would connect more dots to make Myspace trackers work better. Why am I telling you this? Myspace made an annoucement, I just found this on TechCrunch today:

Developers can access any publicly available profile data from a MySpace user and integrate it into their site. This includes a user’s name, picture, bio, social graph (list of friends), and other information. Users authorize the data transfer via a one-time secure OAuth login to MySpace from the third party service. The service is then allowed to access the data.

If this is true, it solves the problems of the early trackers. It sounds like Myspace is saying they will allow scripts to download all the pictures they need, as long as a person signs in. I think more people will be willing to sign in to a tracker if they know they will get access to all kinds of interesting data about the people looking at them, including pictures. But here’s the rub:

Since actual data is being streamed out of MySpace, they have a strict terms of use policy that forbids third party sites from storing or caching the data, other than the unique MySpace user id of the user.

I can see why they’re saying this, Myspace wants these 3rd-party websites to have up-to-date information. And they want people to feel confident their personal information is “safe”. But let’s be realistic, once you do one of these “OAuth logins” do you really think that’s the end of it? Call me a pessimist, but how do we know this information isn’t stored, cached, or (more likely) sold off to other websites? Websites do deals like this behind our back all day long, that’s business as usual, profiling us to sell more targeted ads.

You know Myspace isn’t going to fly software inspectors all over the planet to gain access to the various facilities where the servers are locked up to investigate the source code of every script downloading data off Myspace. Even if such a fantasy were remotely possible, one or two lines of code is all it will take to siphon this data off somewhere seriously profitable. Yes, that data is going to circulate and Myspace trackers will get their hands on it eventually. If you hear of anything let me know.