Time Warner is a huge, sprawling, megabucks magnate of a corporation, yet their recent behavior is as petty as that of a crude pickpocket or con artist. Their latest effort has been focused on trying to hijack the free revolution that once empowered internet users everywhere.  As parent company of www.myspace.com, Time Warner has control of one of the largest on-line communities in existence. In July of this year, only Yahoo had more videos hosted than Myspace did, and Myspace had just introduced their video feature a few months after I joined the site and made my profile. Yahoo’s been hosting videos and providing free Websites for ages compared to the baby that is Myspace. Yet, from the time I read about Myspace in an alternative Boston newspaper until this day, it has grown exponentially and become an aboslute phenomenon. It is the chosen interface for ordinary people, hollywood stars, athletes in all sports, television commentators, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and a whole host of businesses, some that specialize in simply making snazzy Myspace sites for their customers. All of it was designed to be forever free, and for a while verything was grand.  Everyone had at least one friend, good ‘ole Tom, who was always there smiling when you logged in. You could build your page and utilize a bulk of free hosting sites to add videos, pictures, and even songs to your profile. There were on-line guides to show you how to format your pages. My favorite free hosting site handles pictures and videos. It happens to be www.vidilife.com.  Right before Google acquired YOUTUBE, which has been a phenomenon itself after becoming an extremely hot commodity almost overnight, Myspace turned its back on its users because the illustrious parent company failed in their own bid to get Youtube for themselves. When they knew their hopes were dashed, something terrible started happening on Myspace. Videos and pictures all started disappearing. In place of the hosting addresses dots started appearing instead of the site address where the picture or video was located.  All of a sudden only YouTube and Myspace Videos could be posted on everyone’s profile. If you used Youtube, you’d get some messed up programming language that would print before the video clip. If you used vidilife, the video would never post properly, no matter what you did. Two of my profiles (a business site and a personal site) were infiltrated by what some called a virus. Since just about all my pictures and videos came from vidilife, they were all eliminated overnight. Only my Youtube videos remained. I was able to simply re-type all the code and fix the picture problem, and it never resurfaced, but the video problem is still plaguing the site today. You simply can’t host a video other than one from Myspace’s own directory, without making a mess of your page.  To make matters worse, viruses started sweeping the inboxes of different sites. My business site was affected and the problem still hampers my efforts there. I get all the messages that come in, but I cannot respond. I have to go around the problem by using my personal profile, which doesn’t have the same friends as the business profile and makes it far more difficult to send and receive the right messages.  So, what’s a guy to do when all this is happening, much to his frustration, and nobody’s explaining anything? At the time I had no idea what was going on. I had sneaky suspicions that Myspace had purposely shut out all other sites because it wanted to promote its own video base and perhaps was allowing YouTube’s videos to appear, albeit butchered, because it was forming some kind of partnership.  All these problems hit a crescendo when the Google acquisition of YOUTUBE was signed and sealed. Now that the deal is finalized and set in stone, more problems with Youtube video hosting are surfacing. Some previously available videos are gone because of Time Warner going on the attack and claiming copyright violations perpetrated by YOUTUBE. How come they never complained about that issue before? Because they were going to buy YOUTUBE. So all this is going on and bad things are happening all over Myspace to millions of customers, all because these two companies were angry at each other. They decided to beef it out like kids meeting at the flag pole after school. What happened as a result is both companies got hurt. Myspace might keep most of its loyal following, but in time this will bite them. One thing that was revealed in the midst of this whole debacle is that Myspace has a completely inadequate technical support system.  Here we have a huge conglomerated corporation like Time Warner, and they are trying to serve over 100 million customers with some automated, computer generated help system. You send a question that you need answered to fix your site and you get gibberish back. I once asked how to change a band name on a band profile that I built for a friend and his group that split up. The person wanted the old band name to change, but I couldn’t figure out how. I sent several e-mails to help. Each time I got completely different answers back: e-mails that told me how to change my password, e-mails that told me how to change my songs, and e-mails on how to make my profile private. Finally I sent the help desk a simple message: “Myspace help is useless.” At least the computer was smart enough not to produce an automated response for that one.  After that, wanting to figure out what the heck was happening with the inability to post all my old favorite videos I had downloaded on vidilife, I looked all over the internet for a physical address for the people at Myspace. I googled, I Dogpiled, and I asked Jeeves. I found no PO Box or any way to sent an actual letter to any actual person at Myspace. I even tried leaving Tom comments and sending him messages from my personal account.  Nothing. No answers, no solution, no “we’re fixing the problem.” Eventually the whole scenario reminded me of that Verizon commercial when the posing network trying to steal the Verizon customer away is pretending to have a huge army of backup staff that turns out to be made up almost entirely of cardboard cutouts. “That is a problem, and we are working on it,” the guys says lamely. That’s what Tom sent out in a bulletin, worded only slightly different. He said the mailbox problem would be fixed, but my mailbox is still broken. He said the virus problem would be addressed, but I still can’t post the videos I want to. To cover up their own behind-the-scenes hissy fit against Google, Myspace is alienating their own customers. They are forgetting what principles they were built on.  This is a country where we have always championed free speech and free enterprise. With the dot com collapse that happened when the world was not ready for the internet and the technology was not sophisticated enough to make the internet a money-making powerhouse, a revolution happened. More and more sites decided not to charge individual users, but big clients instead who would advertise to reach all those customers who joined the site for free, which they were bound to do if the site had something they were looking for. Myspace came from that environment and is still promising that it will not charge users despite circulating rumors that a user fee is just over the horizon. Yet, it is no longer truly free at all despite those empty promises. It has gone against all the principals of freedom.  There is a cost to use Myspace now. You have to give up using the free sites like vidilife.com and deal with your favorite YOUTUBE videos disappearing. They are actually threatening to eventually start to delete all accounts that post videos or music that the user does not own the copyright to. You also have to constantly police your site if you want to keep it clean and looking professional. The video you had on there today might be gone tomorrow because they’ve forced YOUTUBE to remove it from their database. And instead of just being deleted, there will all of a sudden be a bunch of programming gibberish in its place, making your once professional page look super sloppy.  Here’s the code I posted one one of my pages on Myspace to protest the insolent behavior of Time Warner executives:  Ever wonder what is going on with video hosting here on Myspace? Well, it turns out that Time Warner, who owns Myspace, is jealous because Google outbid them in their attempt to buy YouTube. Check out the following articles to find out what Tom isn’t telling you about why it keeps getting harder and harder to post decent videos on Myspace and why YouTube videos are quickly disappearing.  TIME WARNER TO SUE YOU TUBE  YOUTUBE MAY BE LIABLE FOR $150,000 PER UNAUTHORIZED VIDEO  Go to the link below to get Time Warner’s address and take it from there. Either write a letter on paper, or offer an on-line review that tells them how much they royally ruined your MySpace experience by being a bunch of greedy sore losers  TIME WARNER COMPANY FEEDBACK PAGE  These high-powered executives and their lawyers are basically saying that they’re taking their ball and going home, when the ball isn’t even theirs to begin with. They gave it to their users a long time ago and said, “We made this so you can run with it. Just take care of it, use it as you wish, and don’t pop it or put any risky pictures on it.” What started as a football has now been substituted for a golf ball, and they’re still trying to toss it around like a football.  Sure, people will figure out how to get around the new bugs and still have decent pages, and not many people are going to leave Myspace because of the hassle, but how many of their customers are going to have to completely delete their pages and start over now? How many friend networks will be destroyed, with users left to do all that work over again to reconnect to the folks they used to have on their list already, until Myspace mucked it up for them? How many people are going to want to support the advertisers on Myspace? As it is I wish I could strangle those stupid smiley faces that are always talking to me at the top of every screen. And damn sure I’m not falling for those pop-ups that promise me a free digital camera, X-Box, or laptop once you complete a three hour survey and purchase 3,000 dollars worth of “great offers” that supposedly are never a condition you have to meet to get your free gift.  But beyond the hassle all of the users will face and overcome, is the completely unprofessional way this company is going about this whole thing. Because their users have established themselves and met tons of great people on Myspace, the big corporate execs think their loyalty will remain the same because they have the ball and you need it to play. But, I think what might happen if they’re not too careful is someone will come in with another ball and fill the void. Free networking sites are popping up left and right. There’s friendpages and fightclubonline that are just as good if not better than Myspace. vidilife.com has a weak setup on their profiles that causes all the words to overlap each other, but they still alow you to post whatever you want up to a certain point.  What’s too bad is that I think what Time Warner is doing may actually be illegal. By blocking other hosting companies from posting clean videos, regardless of whether or not the customer owns the copyright, I think they are violating monopoly laws and may also be infringing on the free speech their users are entitled to. What’s even worse is they are so huge that nobody’s going to really call them out for it or do anything to stop it.  These tactics are alienating your users, Time Warner, and I think you owe everyone an apology and an explanation. Make Tom the scapegoat if you want, but be sure to tell everyone why it’s all happening rather than letting them hear it on the news. Before you go deleting profiles, tell everyone how it all started: because you wanted to take your ball and go home.  Rich Bergeron Free Internet Site Fan
Universal Music Group chief executive Doug Morris has said that YouTube and MySpace are copyright infringers and owe us tens ...