MySpace is planning to introduce a set of new features that will allow its users to access their data on other sites, it is announcing today. This is pretty interesting, because MySpace seems like it is trying to make itself the center of the web.

Users will be able to do things like update their own photos on their MySpace profiles, then have those photos automatically update on other sites that use MySpace photos. Besides photos, information that will be shared will include publicly available basic profile information, MySpace TV videos and friend networks.

In one use case the company gives (see screenshot, above), you can create a new Twitter account using information from MySpace, like your profile photo and interests. (Note: It looks like Twitter will be adding an option for more information on user profiles, because some of that data currently does not exist.)

If you want to be able to control what information goes from MySpace to Twitter, you will be able to access a central control panel that will be provided on the MySpace site, that will let you stop information from going from MySpace to Twitter.

In other words, MySpace wants itself to be the home for your data, that you choose to share or not share on other sites. This is somewhat similar to Facebook’s — and Google’s — vision of themselves.

MySpace partners, besides Twitter, include Yahoo, eBay and Photobucket.

The News Corp. owned company is calling this initiative “Data Availability,” which is a not-especially-clever take on the name of another group that’s working for great user data access across sites, called Data Portability — that MySpace is also joining today.

MySpace says it will start releasing these features in the coming weeks. Considering that there’s nothing to see here yet, I’m not going to say this news is earth-shattering. It may turn out, for example, that most MySpace users don’t end up using this feature. We’ll keep you posted with further coverage, once there’s more to cover.

In the meantime, here’s some more details from the company press release:

Partner Website Functionality

Data Availability is about enriching existing Internet destinations with social functionality and valuable pre-existing user generated content and data. By empowering users with the ability to dynamically share, those destinations will create deeper levels of social engagement and new functionality throughout their site. As the online home to 117 million users worldwide, this groundbreaking initiative enables the larger Web to leverage the highly engaged and passionate MySpace global community.

To ease implementation for participating sites, the MySpace Data Availability initiative uses OAUTH and Restful APIs as its core technology underpinnings. MySpace is using open standards in an effort to embrace the open source community and allow the implementation to be as non-proprietary as possible. Today’s announcement is the first step of MySpace’s larger data portability initiatives coming down the pipeline. MySpace is officially joining the Data Portability Project demonstrating our continued commitment to openness and open standards.

Data Availability on Yahoo!

MySpace’s Data Availability complements Yahoo!’s recently announced Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), a company-wide initiative to open Yahoo! to application developers, unlock the rich social connections across the Yahoo! network, and enable users to customize and make more personally relevant their experiences of Yahoo! and other Internet services.

On Yahoo!, the Data Availability initiative may appear to users in a variety of ways. For example, users that have chosen to share their MySpace content and data with Yahoo! Instant Messenger might find their MySpace default photo, interests, and favorite music displayed to their Messenger contacts directly in the IM client. Additionally, MySpace users will be able to choose to display their data within Yahoo!’s universal profile or leverage it in Yahoo! Mail’s smarter inbox, once those upcoming releases are deployed.

“Yahoo! believes in an open Internet that gives users the flexibility to make their Web experiences as