MyspaceMail (screenshot) is an OSX application that will copy all of your mail, comments, and current bulletins off of myspace and alert you when you receive anything new. Apparently the myspace layout changes every once in awhile and blocks this app, but an update gets released and it works again! (note: I’ve been using this app for a little over a month now, and haven’t needed to download an update yet)

This is pretty awesome; you can reply to messages from inside this application as well, definitely cutting down the amount of crap necessary to reap some sort of usefulness from this very cluttered social networking tool.

It’s too bad that sites like myspace, facebook, etc. seem to think that API’s (or even more RSS options) would either cut into their profits, or not yield enough benefit to develop. Because tools like this will keep being developed; people will keep figuring out ways to make the data non-proprietary. And then myspace/facebook will block said tools, and tool developers will find workarounds, until the big guys give in and stop wasting everyone’s time with a more open protocol, just like what happened with AIM and Trillian/gAIM/etc.