YOU NEED WIDGETS to express yourself but MySpace (a place for friends, not for widgets) has taken away some of that personal expression. MySpace is not your space. New restrictions by the web's largest social network now mean you cannot use non-approved embedded widgets to display music, video, advertising or transactions. The News Corporation may be setting these restrictions to "ensure that it alone can commercially capitalize on its 90m visitors each month", according to Lisa Story in the New York Times. But no matter how you analyse these new restrictions, someone on MySpace now cannot design and promote as they wish. This has not gone down well with several high visibility MySpace pages. Blocking widgets dampens the social experience of MySpace. Many high visibility MySpace sites I visit are maintained by unabashedly independent personalities who would not like to camp out in a silo.
Tila Tequila, a singer who has 1.7m friends on MySpace--and is the current poster child of Hoooka-- discovered she could not use the Hoooka music player from Indie911, a Los Angeles-based start-up company. The Hoooka player also facilitates online transactions.
MySpace has taken to blocking third party software when they think the widgets might spread pornography or copyrighted material. MySpace is also blocking widgets that offer ways to advertise and sell without offering News Corporation a share of the cut. Hmmm.
The time was going to arrive when MySpace tried to monetise its community, now derided as FoxSpace by some irritated by these new restrictions. In a related development, the New York Times says "Google will pay (News Corporation) at least $900 million over the next three years to serve ads to the site’s users. And last fall, MySpace announced a partnership with Snocap, a San Francisco-based company, to sell music. Perhaps not coincidentally, this year, MySpace blocked widgets from Revver, a video-sharing site that embeds advertisements in its clips, and Imeem, a music buying service."
Brad Stone -- "MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users"
Ellen Lee -- "Online Hoooka"
Revver -- "What if creativity could pay the rent?"
