In biology, a symbiont is a creature that lives within a host animal in a mutually beneficial relationship. Mitochondria, which are the power plants of our cells originated as separate organisms until they found that they were better off living inside the cells of other organisms. Human civilization would likely be completely different or even nonexistent without our little mitochondria friends.
The same is true of MySpace and Photobucket. Yesterday, MySpace banned users from embedding content they created at Photobucket in their personal pages.
Users are pretty pissed off about the ban. This puts them in the position of having to decide between a social network they love and a photo-sharing service they love. Before, they could use and enjoy both. MySpace and Photobucket had the perfect symbiotic relationship. The services reinforced one another. Now, they’re competing for the same resource: people.
MySpace’s decision to ban Photobucket is a bit like if the human race decided that we were going to extract the mitochondria from all of our cells and make them into a competitor for food and resources. It’s a stupid choice that benefits nobody, least of all MySpace.
Update: Robert Scoble just called Photobucket “parasitic”. I still vehemently disagree. Parasites drain resources from the host without making any contribution. Photobucket made a huge contribution to MySpace’s user base. It didn’t take anything away from MySpace.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Kevin Hillstrom 04.11.07 at 11:58 am
Impressive use of biology — so much of how businesses work fit into your framework. Seriously!
Jcmj 04.12.07 at 11:42 am
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quote:
Robert Scoble just called Photobucket “parasitic”.
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Scoble surely must have meant MySpace…
Lets not even talk about how MySpace continues to overlook the contributions of its own user base - the same community that has not only helped feul its charge in the social networking scene, but a community that has freely assisted in creating tools, resources and solutions to improve in areas of deficiency.
MySpace forum search, you say?
Russell Rockefeller 04.13.07 at 9:03 pm
Myspace is bad for downtime but I absolutely detest PhotoBucket. Whenever I think about Photobucket big Red X’s come into mind. There is nothing worse than getting an error on a message forum about how someone’s bandwidth or image hosting has been limited. I mean how can Photobucket build a business model around creating broken images anyway? I have always used Tinypic.com and have had nearly zero downtime. However, nothing beats having your own dedicated server with burstable transfer.