MySpace Feeds the DeadPool, Nukes Another Startup

So as a lawyer Mike, what do you think about this? Not just this incident in particular, but in the technology field as a whole, do you think lawyers tend to stifle new tech development, or help it?

Obviously, lawyers are needed on both ends of the process, to help new businesses incorporate and patent their work, but on the other end to send cease and desist letters, and to run patent companies whose sole business is to extort money from other patent holders, etc.

Just curious.

I don’t know if putting part-time projects that are basically widgets that never publically had revenue models in a dead pool is the right direction to go here and I’d urge you to reconsider these types of entries.

I’m afraid established media might perceive this stuff in the wrong way and that could lead to a lot of misperceptions - including a negative environment towards start ups and lack of funding for real businesses. I mean if $5 million had been raised on either of these ideas - I mean yeah then they’d belong, but these weren’t in that category, do you see what I’m saying?

Sometimes less content can be more.

hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiichao

@David: so you think only >=$5M funded projects should go here? This wouldn’t be a good filtration I think. And note that Craigslist, del.icio.us also started as a part time project!

Pathetic! MySpace is destroying the innovation here! Their reasoning is ridiculous. People should be aware of this evil approach of MySpace!

myspace is the most pathetic thing humans have ever created and surrounded themselves with. anyone who uses it is just as pathetic

Emre,

I agree, I’m just saying these are ideas that failed - mostly due to legal nonsense. I’m not saying bootstrapped ideas shouldn’t be featured - of course they should! I’m just saying the opportunity cost is low and “failure” could be misconstrued as something it’s not if people didn’t read the fine print. Make sense?

This is a bad move on Fox’s part as it doesn’t take much to setup a myspace competitor — just some simple HTML tools and a lot of bandwidth and server space. And they’ll have built in single status searching which will be a draw for the current myspace user.

What’s keeping people on myspace? There’s no sense of community, it is just a bunch of separate webpages.

So, MySpace can’t take competition?

Hmmm….Where have I seen this before, lets see: shady business practices done to “get rid of” other companies for whatever reason. Who does that remind me of?

Oh yeah, Microsoft.

MySpace with over a billion page views a day claims that their site was subject to undue server burden. That statement is hard to digest especially considering their previous termination of SingleStat.us which had only 10,000 page views. How are these small ventures a threat to MySpace.

Are they so scared that these new startups may turn into the next Google or could it be that they want to safeguard their own information. Another possiblity could be that they want to implement this feature on their own to take advantage of the revenue potential. Regardless, this serves as an example for potential dot.com enthusiasts to be weary of ventures that are connected to larger and more established companies especially ones that are so big, but yet act so small.

MySpace needs to realize that this will only drive more visitors to their site. It’s worth the server drain, which can be nothign compared to what they already are under.

Yeah, the only think that stood between DatingAnyone and a stellar IPO was MySpace’s unavailable API. Really.

To say that DA was a competitor to MySpace is utterly ridiculous. That’s like saying that your blog is a competitor to Google because it runs Google ads.

MySpace needs to focus on far more important things than who’s screen scraping them illegally. Cut them some slack - whether they eventually choose to open their API is a choice we can hope they make. But right now, they need to get some legal muscle to fight the self righteous parents.

@Jeyaram - If the rumours about News Corp wanting to tie myspace up with a search engine are true, then an imaginary threat would be that these services (which are essentially very niche search engines) somehow devaule that tie up. But if that’s the case, I have to wonder that if after myspace does tie up with a search engine, will the other ones get C&Ds as well? After all, they must be violating the exact same terms of service that SingleStatus and DatingAnyone were (but they do have more lawyers :-).

And thinking about it for a little while longer, another, more plausible, threat is that these services will add to myspace’s current “sex pest paradise” stigma. If you’re trying to convince concerned parents that myspace is safe for thier teenage children then services that let anyone in the world keep track of thier teenagers relationship status is not going to help.

Would MySpace react this way pre-rupert? sc

In France, Skyrock, a French radio group focusing on teenagers, has launched a blog platform, Skyblog, a couple of years ago. Today, this French platform counts about 5 million blogs. It’s going to be very hard for Myspace to fight such a strong competition!

The guy even sent MySpace an email in a proactive manner. It was a standup move and Fox still dropped the hammer. It was a fantastic service by a real talent. Booooooooo.

Why are these lawyers always in Beverly Hills, 90210?

It’s the zip code everyone in Britain uses when we need one to access a US website.