More Emerging Technologies

Shel Israel asked an interesting question on his Facebook profile today, “What trends to you see happening in social media?”

My response was that in Web 2.0, companies started blogs when they wanted to engage with their customers. In Web 3.0, they will launch social networks.

It’s funny that Shel’s question came along when it did, because I’ve been spending a lot of time recently gathering information that has a great deal to do with the answer I offered. It turns out that businesses are launching social networks right and left. And a number of tools have emerged in the past couple of years that enable companies to do just that. So I thought I’d take a quick look-see at two very similar business organizations using two different platforms and get a sense of how the space is shaping up.

The National Hockey League launched NHL Connect to great fanfare last year using Cisco’s Five Across platform. I spoke to NHL Vice President Rich Libero on the phone yesterday about how the NHL is doing with its public beta.

NHL fans are more technologically savvy than the fans of any other sport, and “MySpace became a huge player in fan affinity.” Libero told me that Hockey “wanted to apply the same model to the passionate group of fans that happen to follow the NHL.” The goal was to build a “be-all end-all community tool” that would give fans, “yet another opportunity to share their experiences and their love of the sport.”

So far, they’ve been very pleased with the results of their efforts. The site has added 10,000 users between March and May. “That may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things,” said Libero, “but we’re very excited to see the traction we’ve gotten from a beta level product.”

And indeed, the site is pretty beta. The interface is clean but confusing in places. For example, signing up was tricky because the system didn’t notify me that I would need to confirm my registration by clicking on a link sent to my e-mail account before I could log in to the system. When I did try to log in, the site told me that my password was wrong.

It was only after I happened to open a new browser window and see that I had an e-mail from NHL connect that I realized e-mail confirmation was required.

The privacy settings are relatively limited as well. Libero told me that the only real control users have over their privacy is the option to make their posts public or private. Thankfully, the community has been great about policing inappropriate behavior. And there hasn’t even been that much of it, according to Libero. And they do plan to offer more granular privacy settings when the next generation Five Across software comes out later this year.

Still, for a beta product, the site has some very passionate participants. One user I came across belonged to dozens of groups and had hundreds of friends. If the NHL aimed to create a network that channeled the passion of hockey fans into an online environment, they’ve certainly succeeded. I’m anxious to see the next generation of technology associated with this network.

From a technological standpoint, the Arena Football League’s MyAFL network is clearly out of beta. The interface — built with KickApps — is closer to what I’m used to in an online social network, although signing up was tricky simply because the sign up link is buried in a huge hunk of text on the MyAFL home page.

The customizable profile pages reminded me a lot of MySpace’s most popular feature, but without the messiness that sometimes occurs in MySpace code. The site also allows users to import outside RSS feeds, which makes MyAFL more of a portal for centralized interaction, rather than just one more site that needs to be checked every day.

The privacy options on MyAFL were just as limited as those on NHL Connect.

I asked KickApps Marketing Director David Hertog whether more granular privacy settings were in the works. He told me in an e-mail that, “these types of privacy features are on our product roadmap and will be added in the coming months. Although there are certain types of communities that will benefit directly from them, we built KickApps primarily as a platform to build open, public-facing communities.”

I’ve always contended that the privacy settings on sites like Facebook are the gold standard precisely because profiles are not necessarily public-facing to all users. Robust and customizable privacy settings allow users to be more comfortable posting information about themselves. Perhaps I’m wrong on this, but I anticipate that both networks will see a lot more growth and passion from their users if they provide custom privacy settings in the next technological iterations of their respective networks.

Aside from privacy, KickApps shines as a robust application for online community building. The interface was familiar and instantly usable and content was more readily cross-referenced. Given the endless supply of new stuff to look at, I would imagine that MyAFL has a longer average user session than NHL Connect. The only major interface drawback was the prevalence of massive white spaces between the user profiles and the site navigation that appears in some browsers, but not in others.

From a technology standpoint, the NHL will want to focus future efforts on building a smoother interface and a user experience that is more consistent across browsers. The AFL will want to work on improving privacy settings and streamlining some browser-specific design issues.

From a community-building standpoint, both sites are very exciting. It’s clear that while technology is very important, having a passionate user base and engaging with them in a human way are much more important. The NHL community is so robust despite the beta nature of the site because its two nearly full-time moderators and the community of 10,000 are so passionate about hockey. They respect the sport, therefore they respect the community.

Just as with other social media, having a snazzy social network on your company’s site won’t do anything to jazz up a bad product or a poor customer service ethos. The best way to engage with users continues to be genuine enthusiasm for them, their lives, and what they care about. By that standard, both the NHL and the AFL are leading the pack.

Michael Arrington has independent confirmation of yesterday’s rumors that Yahoo! may be looking to buy the Jerry Yang has been named Yahoo’s new CEO. Yang, who founded the company while still in business school, was once thought to be too inexperienced to guide the company. Investors wanted a seasoned executive at the helm. So Yang served in the non-traditional role of “Chief Yahoo.”

The decision on MySpace will be a test of Yang’s strength as a CEO and of his savvy in the fast-changing world of social networks. Many signs point to MySpace’s day in the sun as largely over. The meteoric rise of Facebook, and its recent launch of an “insanely viral” platform for applications makes it unlikely that MySpace can continue to succeed in its current form.

Perhaps an acquisition by Yahoo! and a complete overhaul by longtime Web professionals with a new perspective will put MySpace on top of the social network heap once again. But if I were Yang, I would steer clear.

We’ve been spending a lot of time recently on developing the roster of sessions and speakers for our upcoming conference in Chicago. This happens to be one of my favorite parts of working with the Blog Business Summit because it gives me the opportunity to review experts, ideas and best practices from all over the emerging field of business blogging.

This year, we’re working to bring more corporate speakers than ever before to the podium. Big corporations have a great deal to gain by blogging, but they also have a long way to fall if their initiatives are not well-crafted. In order to give our corporate attendees the information they need, we are drawing speakers from the growing pool of corporations who are blogging and engaging with bloggers successfully.

And while successful business blogging remains the primary focus of our conference, the Blog Business Summit is about more than blogs. New media for online communication are emerging all the time, and we know that our attendees want to be on top of those trends as well. This year’s conference will take a look at emergence of online social networks as powerful media properties in their own right. Understanding how these networks function and how users respond to commercial engagement with their communities is just as important as understanding the rules of successful corporate blogging and blogger engagement.

Another new horizon in our editorial development process has been the launch of our session submission and review system. A lot of successful conferences in the technology space take on an “unconference” model. That is, the attendees shape the editorial and direct how the conference forms. We think this is an interesting idea, but we run a conference that is primarily targeted at the business community.

We started asking ourselves, “how do we adapt our business-oriented conference to a more democratic model without sacrificing hard-hitting business oriented editorial?” We decided to put our money where our mouths are. After all, we’re always talking about listening to community when it comes to product development.

So we worked with our team of geeks to develop a massive custom WordPress plugin that would allow us to make blog posts the fundamental unit of editorial. In short, one blog post = one conference session. The plugin allows us to provide additional meta-data to each post (time, location, editorial track, speakers, etc.).

The plugin also manages and reviews the ratings and proposal system. This allows anyone who is interested to submit a session for review, and to vote on proposed sessions. We think this hits the sweet spot between community participation and the top-down editorial model favored by most business conferences.

Stay tuned in the coming days for some very exciting session and speaker announcements. Sessions will appear right here on the blog (and in our RSS feed) as individual blog posts.

For a long time I’ve wondered why Microsoft stopped making Internet Explorer for the Mac. It’s not that I like IE (it’s probably my least favorite browser), it’s that intentionally restricting the market for a something that taps into the one truly cross-everything platform (the web) is kind of a dumb idea.

Which is why I was also surprised that Safari, Apple’s native browser–which really is a pretty good browswer–wasn’t available for the PC. It seems to me that, just like iTunes, Safari was well suited to float effortlessly onto the desktops of millions of windows users.

Well now the Safari 3 beta is for Windows, too.

Interestingly enough, they have an XP background on their big screenshot instead of a Vista background. I assume, however, that the browser works on both.

Two years ago, this would have been brilliant. Now it’s only halfway brilliant. All the tech-minded people who would have grabbed Safari for the speed and the features are probably, like me, completely attached to Firefox because of the extensions.

And the average “dumb it down” user isn’t going to look much beyond IE7 because it comes with windows and it works. I know this because of how long people kept using IE6.

Still, it will be interesting to see how far it spreads.

[ ps. Probably not very fast as long as it is full of bugs. ]

I can’t remember the first place I saw (and filled in) a captcha. They’re so ubiquitous now that it’s almost impossible to leave a comment or sign up for something without trying to read squiggly little letters and numbers in an image box.

But they’re not going to solve the spam problem. The New York Times (again, I know) has an article about captchas in the Business section, on how captchas are being broken by computer subroutines (and those programs being sold to spammers for $1,000).

And long before now, creative spammers figured out they could re-route captcha images to free porn sites, requiring horny net surfers to fill in a captcha which could then be routed right back–all by computer–to the site that was meant to be for humans only.

Now the big boys like PayPal and MySpace are working on developing systems that ask for true image recognition (is this a vegetable?) - something that is still notoriously hard for computers. It won’t last forever, of course. In fact my favorite quote from the piece is fairly apt:

“No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

So far, the best spam-catching experience I’ve had is with Akisment, which now comes standard with Wordpress installs, and it is indispensable to me.

Ideally, young upstart programmers would stop coding $1,000 programs that crack through anti-spam systems. But that’s not very likely, so I guess it’s time to grab my shovel and start digging a moat.

I’ve been spending a lot of time playing with Facebook’s new “platform” feature. Basically, it allows developers to build neat little widgets that extend the social network in a number of ways. Users can now play games with their friends, share their favorite drink recipes, post songs to their profiles. And cool new applications keep showing up every day.

It’s not as though they’re the first social network to open the kimono to third party value-adds. When Friendster allowed seven developers to work on the network late last year, they experienced a 17.76% jump in unique visitors. It’s clear that users like the creativity that third-party developers bring to the table.

So what makes Facebook’s third-party offering compelling and relevant to businesses? The fact that advertising is no longer the only way to reach Facebook’s more than 16 million users. Companies and organizations can build applications that users find useful. This is a great new way to introduce folks to a new brand or reinforce loyalty to one that’s been around for a while.

For example, US Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was the first political candidacy to create an application for Facebook. The app serves all the most recent Obama video and news onto users’ profiles and enables them to identify and share Obama materials with friends who live in early primary states.

While I think it’s cool that Obama’s campaign has launched an application on Facebook, I think they could do a better job of adding value for users. Folks who already support Obama will be more than happy to use this application, but what about those who are still making up their minds? It would be really cool to see an application that lets users answer political questions to determine how closely their values and priorities align with those of Senator Obama. They key to creating an application that wins hearts and minds is how useful and interesting it is, not how well it serves the organization’s one-sided interests.

As many of you know, one of the coolest features of Google’s Feed Reader is that it enables you to share the most interesting content items coming through your feed. Other people can subscribe to the list — which Robert Scoble calls a “link blog” — and see what you found interesting.

If your business sells stuff online — whether it’s songs, furniture or toys — you should enable users to share their favorite products in similar ways, whether through an RSS reader on an online social network like Facebook. For example, if the iTunes Store offered RSS feeds, I would be sharing Maroon 5’s awesome new collection of songs with the whole wide world. As it is, I can only share the URL with my friends on Facebook through their “share” feature and link to it on my blogs, both of which take longer than just hitting “shift + s” on my keyboard when I come to an item of interest in my RSS reader.

I think it was Scoble who originally said that anyone who launched a marketing site without an RSS feed should be fired. I’ll add “sales” to that list.

To give bibliophiles a look at the people behind their favorite contemporary works, publisher Simon & Schuster plans to launch a book channel on YouTube. The channel will feature two-minute clips of the CBS-owned publisher’s bestselling authors discussing their work and their lives as authors.

Their goal here is right on. The channel is an indirect way of giving users additional content that they find useful. But I think they should focus their distribution methods more broadly than just a YouTube channel. I’d like to see them host the videos on a blog of their own making, just as popular YouTube channel LonelyGirl15 ultimately did. Also, I’d like to see the series as a video podcast on iTunes, so that I can download it onto my iPhone and watch it on the bus.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a big believer in Facebook. I think it’s an awesome social network. I use it to communicate with my friends more than I use traditional e-mail.

One of the coolest features of Facebook is the one that allows you to share content with your friends. You can simply post an interesting article on your profile, or you can push, or “spit” it to friends who might find it interesting.

When Facebook sucks in outside content, it grabs images that are associated with the content in question. Sometimes, the image grabber sucks in an ad rather than a news image. (See the image at left for an illustration).

I wonder whether Ford paid CNet an additional premium to make sure that their ad was sucked into Facebook, or if they just got lucky. Will ad placements like this eventually garner additional revenues for content providers? And what about the distribution mechanism? Might companies pay social networks with sharing features a premium to ensure that their ads (tagged with an ID code) are sucked in with shared content?

Companies often seek to share their success and reduce tax liability by giving to or establishing charities. In addition to being good for the world, this well-established practice has a significant public relations upside.

Another permutation of this phenomenon is participation in open source communities. One of the real upsides of open source technology is flexibility. Businesses can get under the hood and make changes that advance their own interests. In some cases, companies make significant improvements in the technology itself.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that sharing these improvements would be to the company’s detriment. Why give competitors the keys to the proverbial kingdom? But in some cases, the upsides of community involvement far outweigh the potential boon to the competition.

As Jon Udell wrote a couple of years ago:

Nurturing the open source commons isn’t something you do for altruistic reasons. Enlightened self-interest is the real motivation. Like the Internet itself, the modern enterprise now relies on the fruits of the most successful open source projects. But the commoditization of operating systems, compilers, and servers only scratches the surface of what’s possible. All sorts of infrastructure software can benefit from the open source model. Business software, not all of which is necessarily proprietary, is ripe for commoditization too.

To advance these agendas, developers will have to learn to be good open source citizens. Yes, they’ll sometimes make errors in judgment, and they won’t always achieve the desired outcomes. But on the world stage, both failures and successes can loom larger than in the corporate cubicle. Developers who plug into the reputation-driven meritocracy of open source — while advancing the goals of your business — are a force to be reckoned with.

So how can companies determine whether they can benefit from sharing their modifications to an open source technology? Here are my rules of thumb:

• Is the project compatible with the main community’s efforts?
• Do your modifications make the software vastly more efficient, flexible or understandable?
• Are your modifications more than a simple customization for a particular internal need?
• Does your company want to recruit more talented geeks?
• Would this contribution benefit the community at large more than it would benefit your competition?

If you answered yes to all the above questions, chances are that your developments are worth sharing with the world. If you need an example of how this works, just look at Facebook’s involvement with the PHP community.

I recently spoke with a friend who poked gentle fun at some companies who say they want to be, “Web 2.0 compliant.”

“As if it were a standard,” he chuckled.

The term “Web 2.0″ gets tossed around a lot. It’s even starting to become a business buzzword like ’synergy’ or ‘paradigm.’ But what does it really mean?

The Scoble writes:

Web 1.0 was about pages. URLs.
Web 2.0 was about users. Adding them onto corporate pages. Wikis. Blogs. Myspaces.
Web 3.0 is about getting rid of pages altogether. Being able to make the Web YOU want or need. Is Twitter a page? Or a post? Or an SMS? A graph? Or a map display?

I’d like to add a few things to that.

Web 1.0 was primarily about pages and URLs. It was also about sloppy HTML and flash entry pages. The focus was on look and experience in the browser rather than content.

Web 2.0 is about user participation. But it’s also about a shift in focus from wild colors animations and design to simple, clean code and well-organized, tagged, searchable content.

Web 3.0 — as Mr. Scoble calls it — is about discreet chunks of content presenting themselves in various ways. It’s about freeing up that content to be viewed on multiple devices and found in a variety of ways. It’s about developing a standard markup language for content that is easily understood by computers and by humans like microformats.

The future of content distribution means that your customers’ opinions about your products will not just show up when someone Googles your company name. They’ll also be geotagged to your storefront, so that when a potential customer walks by, he can see whether other people have good things to say about your company.

This means that even though services like Twitter aren’t particularly relevant to businesses now, they will be in the future as those discreet chunks of content are formatted, tagged, marked up, cross-referenced, and shared worldwide in real time with anyone who cares.

Scoble wrote today that he was rather surprised that he hasn’t yet been contacted by any companies marketing to new parents. After all, he’s announced his wife’s pregnancy to the entire world via his blog.

He also says that the advertising industry should pay attention to Twitterment. This service basically compares two terms based on the frequency with which they appear in Twitter entries. Here’s a chart comparing the frequency of mentions of Coke vs. Pepsi:

If a representative sample of consumers were using Twitter, this would be unbelievably useful. But the vast majority of people don’t even know what Twitter is, let alone pay attention to or use it. Like I mentioned before, individual tweets don’t get linked to, so they don’t have any real search engine presence.

That said, I do anticipate that one day a Twitter-like feature will be a common feature among social networks and fully integrated with people’s individual Web presences. When that happens, analyzing the data will be of immeasurable value to marketers the world over. But until then, the most relevant measures of the online conversation will continue to be analytics like the report we’re generating about CES.

Update: And speaking of Twitter as a feature rather than a service, it looks like Facebook just cloned it with RSS feeds and a dynamic page listing all friends’ status updates. I almost feel like this is more useful to me as a personal tool than Twitter is.

Sarah Ellison and Suzzane Vranica report today in The Wall Street Journal that for most newspapers, online advertising growth won’t be as strong as predicted. Blogs and other news sources such as myspace are partly to blame:

Media buyers also indicate marketers are beginning to look beyond traditional journalism sites, realizing many news junkies go elsewhere, too. “Advertisers are getting less scared of blogs and newsgroups and now are beginning to take money away from the traditional newspapers’ sites,” says Greg Smith, chief operating officer of Neo@Ogilvy, an interactive ad agency owned by WPP Group’s Ogilvy & Mather, New York.

Another significant drain profiled is the move toward search-focused ads, which of course is a key source of revenue for many bloggers. FYI that we’ll be hosting sessions contrasting ad networks for bloggers at our next event.

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People far smarter than I have declared that the future of social networking is in three places:

1. Social networks that cater to niches.
2. Social networks that act as a hub for people’s many disparate social networking accounts.
3. Mobile social networking.

The third category heated up yesterday when the patent for some key components of mobile social networking sold for $2.6 million.

I did a bit of research into some of the beta social networks out there and had a lot of fun with Socialight. Basically, it uses your phone’s GPS to find out where you are, then it tells you information about locations near you. I quickly joined and geotagged a number of my favorite restaurants, complete with my menu preferences for each.

If you’re a business owner with any kind of a storefront, sites like this matter tremendously to you. Just look at this listing for Huling Brothers auto dealership. Apparently, the store once scammed a mentally disabled man. If you’re a socialight user and your phone beeps with that information when you get in range of Huling Brothers, are you going to want to shop for a car there?

This is very similar to the wine bottle story that John Battelle told in his book The Search. In that instance, a person can find out what her friends thought about a particular vintage and where in the area she might be able to buy it for cheaper just by scanning the bottle’s bar code with her mobile phone.

The importance of these variants on mobile social networking and opinion sharing will only grow for your customers over the next five years. And unlike a number of online services that aim to do the same thing, they’re impossible to game. These networks enable people to listen only to their friends or other people whose opinions they have come to trust. If you post a recommendation for your own restaurant, not too many people are going to pay attention.

The recent tragedy at Virginia Tech has shocked the nation and provided the cable news stations with a 24/7 stream of graphic, tragic images. Viewers have been treated to round-the-clock coverage that repeats the sad facts of yesterday’s massacre — the death toll, the locations of the separate incidents, the statements by President Bush and Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger — ad nauseum.

But in this most recent national tragedy, the most compelling, hard-hitting and provocative sources of news have not been mainstream. The most important news has been broken by the students of Virginia Tech themselves as they share information and grieve together on the student-oriented social networking site Facebook.

Just as September 11th, 2001 cemented the blogosphere as an important source of news, so has the Virginia Tech incident cemented the importance of social networks in how people get their information.

Couple this striking fact with the recent study that concluded that viewers of Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report were more informed about current events than viewers of FOX News or CNN and you start to see a pattern emerging: mainstream news is being rapidly eclipsed by other forms of media, both old and new.

As always, the most compelling and informative content will always draw the most eyeballs. People are moving away from mainstream and network television as more varied and compelling options present themselves. Needless to say, marketers will need to pay attention to this fact moving forward.

Author’s Note: The thoughts and prayers of the entire Blog Business Summit team are with the Hokie nation today as they recover from yesterday’s tragedy.

The ever-prolific Michael Arrington asks today, “Can PhotoBucket Survive Without MySpace?”

He cites a lot of statistics based on some leaked information about PhotoBucket’s revenue stream. But the gist of what he says is that most of PhotoBucket’s revenue has nothing to do with MySpace. He also makes a pretty bold statement, which is that a non-trivial number of users are going to pick PhotoBucket over MySpace.

It’s a bold statement that I agree with. Here’s why:

1. MySpace acted unilaterally to block the PhotoBucket content, which we all know pisses users off. To compound the problem, they’re not engaging with their pissed-off users in any real way.
2. MySpace turned a symbiont into a competitor when they blocked PhotoBucket. PhotoBucket has loyal, invested users who are now pissed off at MySpace.

This begs the question: can MySpace survive without PhotoBucket? In the short term, the obvious answer is, “of course.” But longer term, I’m not so sure. If MySpace continues the practice of regularly alienating third-party value adds for reasons that they don’t explain clearly, then I think their prospects for survival head south big time.

The future of social networking is in opening the platforms up to interoperability and cross-pollination. Users will gravitate toward sites that allow them to make connections with as many people as possible. The sites that win will embrace that fact and figure out how to monetize it rather than resisting and stonewalling. It’s really that simple.

I was actually really intimidated by the process of migrating this wiki, but I managed to make it happen. Many thanks to the good folks who wrote this supremely helpful article at Media Wiki.

If you see any bugs with the wiki, please leave me a comment here. Otherwise enjoy!

PS: See, Easton! I did it!

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.

Today without warning, MySpace unilaterally turned off its users’ access to PhotoBucket, which is one of the most popular third-party services for photo sharing and display on the Web.

Photobucket users can upload their photos and share them. Or they can create complicated slideshows and embed them using HTML. The most popular place to embed these slideshows and photos used to be MySpace, until the social networking giant unilaterally turned off access to the software.

On it’s blog, the Photobucket team wrote:

We are not happy about this and we’re pretty sure you’re not happy either. We appreciate that you have invested hundreds of thousands of hours using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. In particular, you’ve all been really embracing videos at Photobucket — to the tune of 50,000 video uploads a day, which is great. Rest assured that your content is being kept safe in your Photubucket album even though it may disappear from your MySpace pages.

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. 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 recently blogged about how Facebook learned its lesson about drastic unilateral changes to its product. In short, they unilaterally launched a very controversial feature known as a “news feed” about six months ago. The feature made users’ activities on the site much more public and transparent, and the uproar was tremendous.

Let’s contrast that with today. This morning, Facebook launched a series of major changes to their user interface. But this time, they were smart enough to engage users in the decision making process months ahead of time. They started a group for users who wanted to share their two cents about the new interface. They posted screenshots and discussed the ramifications of potential actions. They changed course on a few features based heavily on user input. In short, they listened.

I would argue that MySpace’s ban on Photobucket is even worse that last year’s newsfeed fiasco at Facebook. Why? Because on top of unilaterally taking action that profoundly affects their users, they’ve taken away an essential feature rather than adding something new and cool. This really does send the message to MySpace users that the site thinks of them as commodities rather than people who are building a community online.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch believes a conspiracy is afoot:

This is turning into a habit for MySpace, which usually claims bugs, security issues or terms of service violations were the cause of a shut down. In January MySpace mysteriously shut down all Flash widgets on the site for 2.5 hours. An Imeem blockade came next. Vidilife, Stickam and Revver have been permanently banned.

Today’s shutdown of Photobucket comes suspiciously close to news that Photobucket is up for sale (Fox, MySpace’s parent company, was notoriously rumored to be furious when YouTube sold to Google). It seems that just when a company starts to break out from the pack, MySpace finds a security breach and shuts them down. Even though MySpace has flat out denied it to us, it is our belief that these blockages are meant to send a clear message to widget companies - don’t forget that MySpace is in charge.

If this is true, it represents a mentality that simultaneously devalues the individual user and third-party innovation that enhances the end user’s experience. With this kind of an attitude, MySpace might indeed go over the proverbial hill in a hurry.

Via Techmeme.