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.
