Monday, December 26, 2005
Well, it had to happen sooner or later. With all the silly hype around whatever it is you want to think Web 2.0 really is, much of it focused on the idea of various new services working well together. However, once the big media players started buying up the hyped up little companies, you knew there'd eventually be some sort of conflict over what was allowed. There was a lot of worry when Rupert Murdoch's News Corp first picked up MySpace about how they would change the community. However, MySpace continued to thrive (even if the numbers don't really add up) as News Corp., mostly left them alone. Unfortunately, it appears that the old controlling mindset is sneaking back in as a bunch of MySpace users have discovered that they can no longer integrate with YouTube, a popular video hosting site. It's not entirely clear why this happened, but it does hint at some of the conflicts to come as more traditional media companies try to get their heads around the idea that what makes many of these new services useful is the fact that they avoid heavy handed control over what you can do -- even if it seems somewhat competitive to what the media companies are trying to do themselves.
