MySpace, the popular online community and social networking site, announced plans to add games, email and other features developed by outside providers next month. Adding applications from the outside is possible now, but it’s a little too difficult for the average member, involving cutting and pasting the relevant code from a third party. Now, however, those developers can take the initiative.

A photo-sharing service, for example, could create a MySpace-friendly program that allows users to let their friends flip through photos on their own page, instead of leaving the site. Facebook and other Web 2.0 leaders have already gone this route, and the experiment has proven successful. The point of all this, of course, is to keep users in the community. If they don’t ever leave, then they don’t go looking at some other site’s ads.