MySpace Blocks Photobucket Videos, Drifts Further From Its Roots
MySpace rose to prominence for a bunch of reasons – many of them not replicable, to the chagrin of the many hundreds of social networking start-ups looking to get a zillionth of MySpace’s user base – but one of them was a freewheeling, laissez-faire spirit that basically let people do whatever they wanted with their profiles, including jamming every kind of third-party widget, add on, and crappy font creator that let kids feel as though they were really creating their own personalized home online.
But as MySpace ramps up the monetization of its massive audience, it is making choices that are altering the (lack of) ground rules that helped to make it the Kleenex of social networking websites. By forging lucrative alliances with companies like Snocap, it is at the same time moving to block music players, widgets, and other add-ons produced by companies who do not have such an agreement in place.
The latest news comes in the form of a professional yet pissed off-sounding post from the official Photobucket (a leader in the photo and media hosting space) blog: “Today MySpace made the decision to prevent Photobucket users from posting their videos and remixes to their MySpace pages.” It then goes on to accuse MySpace of subverting the rules in the age of the open platform – the social media platform that fueled the rise of MySpace and YouTube and Photobucket and Flickr, and on and on: “We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media.”
For a quick round-up of reaction around the blogosphere, check out The RSS Blog.
MySpace is within in its rights to act this way, of course. Just as companies are free to look to newer and more freewheeling platforms (like Twitter) to develop for.
And just as its audience is free to move on to one of the many hundreds of social networking start-ups, who will welcome them with open arms, and in most cases a freewheeling and laissez faire spirit.
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April 11th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
I would be happy to see MySpace and its crappy coding burn and die. Unfortunately, I think something equally evil would take its place.
April 11th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
I think it’s more like evils if you want to think along those lines, Anna! Certainly there are a massive wave of competitors looking to best MySpace in terms of design and functionality, but the hilarious thing (from a web development standpoint) is that MySpace didn’t need a fancy look or crazy “web 2.0″ tools. It’s still a clunky, ugly mess of a site and yet it stands atop an enormous social networking heap.
But I do think the easiest way for them to burn thier users and send people packing is to begin limiting the ways in which they can use the site. This is a bad road for them to head down in my view.
April 12th, 2007 at 5:29 am
[...] MySpace Blocks Photobucket Videos, Drifts Further From Its Roots ¦ Online Media Cultist (tags: myspace photobucket web20) [...]
April 24th, 2007 at 10:53 am
[...] few weeks after Photobucket lambasted MySpace for blocking its millions of users from embedding Photobucket videos on the most popular social [...]
May 7th, 2007 at 11:36 am
[...] you’ve been following this relationship, you know that it was only recently that the leading social networking site and one of the leading third-party widget/media hosting [...]