MySpace Open Search API

The MySpace Search API allows you to search MySpace for user, videos, images, and music. With an individual feed for each search item. It is designed to function like a search on the MySpace website and to have a response format that is compatible with OpenSocial. The API returns either JSON or XML and in this tutorial i’ll be using PHP and CURL to parse an XML response to build a simple MySpace search page.

Application use

Open Search could be used to mash data using the MySpace API with other applications, for example automatically pulling in a users MySpace profile image, name, location and URL. Building a Facebook application that recommends bands to you on MySpace.

The Code

Just like the Twitter search API tutorial that I did a last year we’re using the CURL function in PHP5 to allow us to parse the XML file and format the data that we get back.

Here’s how it works

Any search that we make will send GET variables through the page URL therefore making it easy to see the data that we’re sending to the API generally you will see search pages use this method as we’re not transmitting private data such as usernames or passwords.

The search data is stored in the variable $q if nothing is searched for initially we run a default search mainly for demo purposes with the search term ‘Coldplay’. You’ll notice that the first result on the left is highlighted green, this is because it is the official profile for the Coldplay. you can see that we construct the URL and store it in the variable $search. There are many different variables that can be passed to the API. It’s worth pointing out that we’re using the People search call. You can see all the values that can be passed in here

Here is an example XML request: http://api.myspace.com/opensearch/people?searchTerms=ferrari&format=xml

//Search API Script

$q=$_GET['q'];

if($_GET['q']==''){

$q = 'coldplay';

}

if($_GET['pics']==1){

$pics[0] = '&hasPhoto=on';
$pics[1] = 'checked';

}

if(!empty($_GET['location'])){

$pics[0] = '&location='.urlencode($_GET['location']).'';

}

$search = "http://api.myspace.com/opensearch/people?searchTerms=".urlencode($q)."&format=xml".$pics[0]."";

$cu = curl_init();

curl_setopt($cu, CURLOPT_URL, $search);
curl_setopt($cu, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
$result = curl_exec($cu);
$search_res = new SimpleXMLElement($result);

echo "<h3>".$search_res->totalResults." MySpace results for '".$q."'</h3>";

// Echo the Search Data

foreach ($search_res->entry as $user) {

$officialprofile = null;

if($user->isOfficial==1){

$officialprofile = 'official';

}

echo "<div class='user ".$officialprofile."'><a href=\"".$user->profileUrl."\" target=\"_blank\"><img border=\"0\" width=\"68\" class=\"user_image\" src=\"".$user->thumbnailUrl."\" title=\"".$user->displayName."\" /></a>";
echo "<div class='text'>".$user->displayName."</div> <strong>".$user->location."</strong><br/><a href='".$user->profileUrl."' >Visit ".$officialprofile." profile</a><div class='clear'></div></div>";

}

curl_close($cu);

<div id="search">
<form action="" method="get">
  Search MySpace <input type="text" name="q" value="<?php echo $q;?>" id="searchbox" />
 Location <input type="text" name="location" value="<?php echo $_GET['location'];?>" id="location" />
  Only show users with profile pics <input name="pics" type="checkbox" value="1" <?php echo $pics[1];?> />
  <input type="submit" name="submit" id="submit" value="Search" />

</form>
</div>