What MySpace has done with Photobucket — blocking users from posting video clips that are hosted at Photobucket — is totally understandable and hardly surprising, particularly given the company’s past behaviour, as Mike Arrington at TechCrunch points out. It’s in MySpace’s interests to constrain its users in that sense, and it no doubt seems like a great idea every time someone brings it up at one of the board meetings with News Corp. types (see update below).
Regardless of how obvious and unsurprising it might be, I think MySpace is making a mistake. The tendency to try and wall users in, or control what they are posting, or force them to use your tools, takes you down a road that inevitably leads to what I call AOHell. That’s what people used to call America Online, back in the good old days of the late 1990s — and not just because they kept bombarding you with sign-up disks and/or made it virtually impossible to cancel your account once you got trapped in their spider’s web. AOL was the quintessential walled garden of content, and it virtually killed the company, and TimeWarner along with it.
Yes, it’s good to be aware of what MySpace controls and doesn’t control if you are a user, and you may want to look at getting your own blog somewhere else, as the Scobleizer recommends. And it’s good for companies to be aware of how much their business depends on someone else, as Om points out. But that doesn’t make what MySpace is doing any less stupid.
As Steve O’Hear notes at ZDNet, part of what helped MySpace take over from Friendster as the king of the social-networking scene was that it was more open and allowed users to do more. Notice that I didn’t say “do more, but only with MySpace’s built-in tools.” Greg Sterling of Screenwerk found the quote I was trying to recall from News Corp.’s COO about people sponging off MySpace.
Update:
According to a statement from Fox Interactive Media that Om has posted, MySpace blocked Photobucket because the company was encouraging its users to post clips promoting an “ad-sponsored” video contest. My point remains the same. Should MySpace allow users to post things with ads that come from other companies? I know it’s counterintuitive, but I would argue that it should. Either you’re a social network or you’re not. Tony Hung has more.