In July, News Corporation announced that it had purchased Intermix and all associated products for US$580 Million. Intermix owned and operated MySpace.com, one of the largest social portal sites on the internet boasting nearly 50 million members.
Everything was going along swimmingly for News Corporation, until they started censoring what their users were writing! It is the expectation that the internet is free and anyone can write just about anything and ultimately no one will care. It seems that News Corporation took offense to their users linking and discussing their competitors. When users would mention a competitor, the posts were being edited and the offending words, images and links deleted.
You would assume that MySpace were feeling threatened by their competitor and sought to weed it out of their site. Unfortunately, this manual intervention stirred the pot a little more than expected and a huge backlash followed. As soon as the backlash gained momentum, MySpace stopped censoring their clients information and restored all of the existing data – in fear of it escalating any further.
I think this would have been a very strong lesson learned for the new owners of MySpace. In an online business, even more so for a business driven by the power of social networking, you can’t suddenly go and change the rules. If you change the rules and your users don’t like it – your competitor is only ever a handful of keystrokes away.
This comment is unrelated, I just wanted to let you know that for the past couple of days, late at night you’ve had some downtime. In case you didn’t know.
Please delete this in the interests of neatness, and sorry for the off-topic nature of it.
Milo,
Interestingly, I went to your site late last night and I couldn’t reach it as well. I hit refresh a couple of times and then it was fine. Whats odd though, mine is hosted in Canberra at McGooHQ while yours is hosted at The Planet.
Al.
Very odd… what’s more interesting is that I’m not accessing the internet via my host, so the relationship isnt reciprocal.
Did I read right? are you actually hosted on your ISP’s backbone? maybe that is having some work done to it in the wee hours? that might explain problems with both incoming and outgoing traffic from sources on opposite sides of the world.
Milo,
My site is hosted with McGooHQ which are powered by (among others I’m sure) my ISP. So if for some reason my ISP was doing maintenance, then it would make sense that my web site was offline for me – but not neccessarily anyone else (depending on how everyone elses traffic flows into my web host).
Al.
Looking at their Network Diagram there are a variety of possibilities.
Anyway, I was awake until the wee hours again last night and it was fine. I only wished to draw your attention to it because I noticed it over two successive nights.
I have a dedicated box at The Planet with a few other sites on it… so I tend to panic if my blog is down, heh.
It’s such a nice network diagram too!
Thanks for the heads up though.
Al.
I was blissfully unaware that this even happened, thanks for bringing it to my attention; don’t mess with the power of a social network. I wish the same was true for non-social networks like the omnipotent Ebay!
~Scotty
Anyone else having bother with myspace or is it just my pc?
Last couple of days it seems it wont let me download any song from anywhere.
Anyone having same bother – or anyone how to sort it?