MySpace is one of the largest social network sites on the internet, if not the largest. Giving people a place to find new people, push their crappy music on us and sound out millions of spam bulletins daily is big business, raking in millions of dollars annually. MySpace knows this and has slowly started to partner with some companies while quietly disabling the ability to use the competitions third parties apps, code, and widgets on their personal Profile.

MySpace made another move to block content hosted by competitors from being embedded on user profile pages within the site—this time, the popular photo and video hosting site Photobucket.

Photobucket now joins the list of several companies understandably displeased with such developments at MySpace, as they all stand to lose traffic and mindshare as a result. A post on the Photobucket blog points out MySpace’s action and asks its 40+ million users to e-mail MySpace to tell them what they think. “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,” writes Photobucket. “MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.”

I don’t use PhotoBucket’s service, however they are one of the two biggest players in hosted image solutions for people on MySpace. My belief is that MySpace wants to have more control over what users are posting and who they are using to do this. By closing the doors down and making the wildly popular site more restrictive they could loose millions of users.

Source: ARS Technica

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