MySpace Blocks Photobucket Video

Blog.Photobucket.com: Breaking news: Posting from Photobucket to MySpace Photobucket is alledging that MySpace has made a decision to prevent Photobucket users from posting their video and remixes to their MySpace pages.

"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."

I haven't actually seen any sort of a formal response from Fox Interactive on this yet, but you might want to watch Arrington's blog as I imagine maybe they will respond there at some point later today.

A similar incident took place in January. Om Malik later reported that a Fox Interactive spokesperson cited a bug for the previous blockage. The statement at that time seemed to pretty clearly indicate that Fox had no plans to block the popular Photobucket service:

“The toll booth rumor is categorically untrue. We have no plans, current or future, to charge people for widgets. We are working on a filter for security reasons – so there may have been a bug due to that…if so, it’s fixed now and working – no more quicktime worm or flash probs from here on out.”

Still sites like Revver and other sites have been reportedly blocked by MySpace which makes you wonder how open their social network really is.

My own personal belief is that social media platforms ought to be as open as possible, allowing as much cross posting and pollination between sites as possible. Purposely restricting users from site functionality for business purposes is likely to backfire in the end.

Update: Apparently Fox says they blocked the Photobucket video because they had advertisments in them. I still think that's pretty lame. Lots more commentary and analysis over at Arrington's and Om's house.