In a bid to grab eyeballs of some thousands of social networking buffs in an Orkut-struck India, earlier this month, News Corp launched MySpace for the Indian market.

MySpace has been a major player among social networking Web sites in the western world. Apparently "applications" in social networking sites play an important role in keeping people engaged. MySpace realized this soon enough, and in February, invited developers to create and test applications for it. Now that the MySpace developer platform has passed the beta phase, it is accessible to all users through an application gallery called 'MySpace Apps'.

MySpace members will now be able to browse through this gallery and add various applications to their profiles. The gallery will offer users a choice of over a thousand applications, according to MySpace.

Applications, up until now have been the show-ground for FaceBook. With thousands of applications to choose from, it has managed to keep most of its members loyal. Of course, there's the MySpace vs. Facebook debate, but that's more relevant for the western countries. Now that MySpace is trying to play catch-up to FaceBook, only time will tell whether it wins the critics' award.

And as far as India is concerned, both players have a tough contender in Orkut. Possibly, the inclusion of the applications feature should work in their favor to attract compulsive social network users.