MySpace to Secondary Markets: Drop Dead
Posted: July 20th, 2006 | Author: alicetiara | Filed under: business, social networking |
On Monday, MySpace started displaying the following message when you log in (this is kind of a crappy screenshot, but you can see it larger if you click on it):
“hey folks - we are moving myspace music players and video players to flash 9.0. flash 9 has security fixes so that people can’t mess with you on myspace. if your ‘about me’ got screwed up this weekend, you could have been safe if you had flash 9 installed. here’s an easy way to install it, go watch this dashboard video i posted last week. if you don’t like dashboard, just watch any video in our video section, and you’ll be prompted to install flash 9.”
What Tom doesn’t mention is that Flash 9 has a a new attribute for the [object] tag called allowNetworking. When set to “internal”, it prevents the use of any Flash Player APIs which interact with the browser, including getURL() which is used to link to other pages from the player. (Note that josh endquote explained this to me). He writes:
“MySpace now transparently adds ‘allowNetworking=”internal”‘ to all Flash Player instanced placed in its pages, effectively disabling any buttons which link anywhere.”
So: stuff like Slide.com, RockYou.com, and YouTube’s Flash video wrappers will no longer be able to link back to the sites if the user is using Flash 9. Generally adoption for Flash isn’t that quick — but since all users with Flash 8 currently have broken MySpace video/audio players, you can expect that to have somewhat of an effect on the adoption rate (i.e.: skyrocket).
MySpace can say all they want about wanting to protect users, but really this is about them protecting their advertising dollars. The barnacle-like secondary market sites will have to find increasingly creative techniques to launch Flash-based content within the site if they want it to spread virally.
This is actually quite wily on the part of MySpace. And it’s going to be interesting to see how much influence they have on the adoption rates of Flash 9… I wonder if they have a formal partnership with Macromedia/Adobe.
Expect a LOT MORE moves like this from MySpace. I’m aware of a few I can’t talk about that I know will have huge impacts on secondary market sites. If you work for a startup whose entire business plan depends on mooching off MySpace’s user base, you guys might want to consider diversifying your revenue streams.
I will be curious to see the fallout rate of users who are annoyed by it. Overall locking down their network seems like a bad idea. The openness of systems like flickr and vox amaze me. Of course MySpace doesn’t need to do any of that.
[...] The new version of flash was required after a flash based worm was discovered this weekend this weekend that had spread far and wide through the site and sent users to an off site page claiming that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Blogger Alice Marwick,with assistance from Josh Santangelo, pointed out today that when Flash 9 is installed, site administrators have the option of turning off the ability for flash objects to link externally. MySpace administrators have apparently made that choice; users can no longer click through embeded YouTube Flash objects to pages off site once they have installed the Flash player 9 that is required to view MySpace hosted videos. [...]
I’m stoked about it. The quicker Player 9 gains market share, the easier my job gets. This’ll be a real test of the steps Macromedia took taken to make the 8-to-9 upgrade experience as smooth as possible.
People don’t know, so they won’t revolt, until all the stuff they learned about embedding stuff, stop’s working :P.
I think it is going to be fun to watch though!
A
i didn’t update to flash 9 when i got that message yesterday, but my audio player still worked today. is it different for macs, maybe?
[...] flashベースのワームが週末検出され、サイト全体に広まり、米政府が9/11同時多発テロを背後で操っていたと主張する外部サイトにユーザーが誘導される事件があったことから、今はflashも新バージョンの導入が求められている。ブロガーのAlice Marwickは今日Josh Santangeloと一緒に、Flash 9をインストールする場合、サイト管理者にはflashオブジェクトからの外部リンク機能をオフにできるオプションがあると指摘した。MySpaceの管理者がこの選択を選んだことは明らか。ユーザーはMySpaceがホストする動画を見ようとFlash player 9をインストールした途端、サイトに埋め込んだYouTubeのFlash動画から外部リンクに飛ぶことができなくなる、というわけだ。 [...]
I can’t wait for MySpace to implement something like that to prevent hotlinking of images … oh wait, why would they do that? Not because their users are sapping the bandwidth of tens of thousands of websites out there … nah … never mind.
i think that you have missed some of the news about myspace lately.
“Hacked Ad Seen on MySpace Served Spyware to a Million” ( http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/07/myspace_ad_served_adware_to_mo.html )
or this: ( http://www.digg.com/security/Myspace.com_hijack_is_currently_spreading_like_wildfire )
i didn’t notice the allownetworking thinger. eeeenteresting. luckily for me, all the embed tags for my pets have always included a plain html link back to my site, besides just the in-swf link. i actually did that on purpose, for googlejuice reasons, but it seems now there is an added benefit.
one workaround for now is for embed-providers to include an html link back to their site in their tags, the way layout sites do it.
[...] Sound like Microsoft to you? Well, this time it’s not Microsoft that’s using this strategy, it’s News Corp, with their social networking site MySpace. After the recent addition of MySpace Video, now MySpace has added new functionality to their site that is broken in Flash 8, which requires the beta version of Flash 9 to work properly. The catch? MySpace has also adds the allowEmbedded=”internal” attribute to all of the tags in their player which instantiate Flash widgets. The result, if the Flash widget links to any external content, like, say a video hosted on YouTube, for example, and the user is using Flash 9, the widget will not work. That’s anti-competitive behaviour if I’ve ever seen it (the “extinguish” part of the equation). tiara.org » MySpace to Secondary Markets: Drop Dead [...]
also, i just realized something.
if i am correct, this will only block communication between the flash file itself and outside servers — it won’t block external flash files from being included.
hopefully someone can clear this up
Just a side note, but flash 9.0 is not supported in Linux, Unix, or BSD. Looks like MySpace hates geeks as well as competing venues.
@pog - There will be a Linux Version of Flash 9. You gotta be patient (like until early next year :)
They said the same thing about Flash 8, which still has not come out yet.
i installed flash nine, and my youtube wrapped videos still link back to youtube. what gives?
MySpace and Secondary Markets…
I’ve been working on a long post concerning social networks and markets such as the affiliate channel when I came across this (from tiara.org) news that MySpace is requiring an upgrade to Flash 9… So: stuff like Slide.com, RockYou.com, and……
myspace filtering tends to happen at the time of editing. so, existing flash embeds will not have the ‘allownetworking’ attribute set, and the links in those videos still work. however, if you add a new video, or edit the section where your current video is, the links will break.
[...] From Tiara.org: “MySpace now transparently adds ‘allowNetworking=”internal”‘ to all Flash Player instanced placed in its pages, effectively disabling any buttons which link anywhere.” [...]
[...] Apparently, mySpace is now upgrading all its Flash to Flash 9 in response to a hole present in earlier versions. This just sucks for linux users. Flash 8 isn’t yet available for linux; I doubt we’ll see Flash 9 for several years at least. [...]
This is really a giant pain for my company, StyleFeeder. Our badge/MySpace toy/widget basically just offers links back to our site with pretty pictures– nothing malicious about a link — but it totally breaks for Flash 9 users on MySpace.
[...] tiara.org » MySpace to Secondary Markets: Drop Dead [...]
[...] I guess YouTube has two or three hurdles it has to overcome. First, I don’t know the legal status of its technology. Is it sufficiently unique and sufficiently protected that YouTube could license it to networks? Or could Viacom (the parent of Comedy Central) develop a similar homegrown solution relatively quickly? Secondly, the quality of YouTube is fine for sharing video created with consumer-grade equipment, but it’s pretty poor compared to other technologies like QuickTime and RealPlayer that large TV organizations use. As Valleywag pointed out, “The resolution is 2002-quality.” I imagine YouTube is working on improving the quality and performance of their player. A final issue is that old-media TV networks are probably resistant to sharing their content. It may not be an accident that Comedy Central makes it difficult to blog clips from “The Colbert Report.” They want to drive viewers to their site. Of course, I and a thousand other bloggers think this is short-sighted, but it probably requires a shift in the culture of TV production. Moreover, while bloggers like me who adminster their own sites, have no problem with embedding outside content, the major providers of online presence might. While MySpace explained their upgrade to Flash 9 as a security measure, it may also be motivated by a desire to restrict what kinds of content are embedded on user pages. Despite these hurdles, YouTube’s solution for embedding video online could be a great solution for major content providers. [...]
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MySpace disabled Quicktime embeds try it for yourself. Today I wanted to add a new quicktime movie embed and it didn’t work looked at the page source and found out that myspace was stripping the .mov extension and changing it to ..
In fact if you add the text .mov anywhere in myspace it changes it to .. it doesn’t even have to be in an embed tag
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[...] Looks like MySpace is already pushing Flash 9. This should help increase the penetration rates very quickly. Check out tiara.org for more info. [...]