Platforms

7 May 2007

Ok, I just plain don’t get this:

Sure, there’s a huge amount of synergy between the two audiences, with most of Photobucket’s users using it to post stuff on MySpace, but I really don’t get why MySpace didn’t just clone their features; photo and image uploading and sharing really isn’t that hard, other then from a bandwidth/storage perspective, and MySpace surely have enough experience in that department…

My best guess is that this is an acquisition to prevent someone else getting their hands on Photobucket, and if you think about it like that, it starts to make a little more sense. Photobucket sourced and hosted images are almost completely pervasive throughout MySpace, and you can be sure that they didn’t want someone else (like Facebook, for example) getting control over such a large amount of MySpace page real estate.

What it boils down to is that MySpace needed to jump on this feature years ago; if they had opened up their photo posting functionality to make posting images and the like more flexible before Photobucket really took hold they wouldn’t have had to fork out $250 million dollars now.

This throws an interesting slant on what I was writing about recently, namely that MySpace needs to embrace third party developers that develop content for MySpace.

Well, I guess in a way they’ve done that, but it’s not quite what I was getting at…

In fact, this acquisition is yet another sign that MySpace really don’t know what they’re doing; simply throwing money at the situation is going to help anything in the long term. While it’s Photobucket today that’s got the mind share behind it, and hence needs buying to keep sweet, tomorrow it’ll be someone else. Will they buy the next MySpace-based upstart? And the next? It’s hardly a sustainable pattern.

Again, as I pointed out last time round, they need to create a developer community; help people build things and make money of MySpace. In other words, they need to take a leaf out of Microsoft’s book – much as I hate to say it, but they are past masters at being dominant market leaders – and turn MySpace into a platform for developers to work on.

It’s the only chance they have.

From: Articles

7 May 2007