Up until now, MySpace's lack of interaction has been a passive one; users could embed third-party content from other sites in their pages. But now, MySpace has started blocking links to rival sites like photo-sharing site PhotoBucket.
What doesn't make sense is Fox's assumption that the MySpace stronghold (81 percent of the social networking market) can withstand a backlash from developers and users who prefer a more open environment -- even one that hosts ads and the Flash-based widgets that MySpace says are a security threat. In the end, MySpace is just one mass migration away from becoming Tripod.
The company's efforts to circle the wagons and push offending third-party widgets from its site comes at an interesting time. Its closest competitor, Facebook, has unannounced (but confirmed) plans to open its site to third-party widgets for the first time. Ultimately, the two sites could come to resemble each other, but which will users prefer?MySpace users are a stoical lot, willing to put up with having their spaces plastered with flashing, buzzing ads and to make do with late-20th-century levels of functionality in the age of the dynamic mashup; however, some are speculating that as Murdoch tightens his grip and attempts to get value from the $580 million he spent on the site, users will realise that MySpace is not their space but the online equivalent of a tightly controlled shopping mall and move on to more open sites.
MySpace does suck real hard, but its blogs do have RSS feeds - I'm subscribed to a number. For instance, goto http://www.myspace.com/brackenmusic and click on "View All Blog Entries", and (after the first time just now, when I got a wonderful unexplained MySpace error, yay!) you get a link to the RSS feed, as "RSS"... It's: http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=95190431 which surprisingly enough seems to imply that we can derive the RSS feeds for any MySpace user (if it's not private)...