I’ve been noticing and reading about alot of changes that Myspace is using in an attempt to thwart abuse of its platform by phishing sites, spammers and other evil-doers. I recently posted about what seemed like a test with inactive links (just text) in bulletin posts - automatically adding an extra period before the .com to make cut and paste users hit a “page not found” error. I believe that this was just a test, as it is not currently being employed to my knowledge. 

A more obvious tactic that Myspace has been systematically employing over the past few months shows that they are taking their outgoing links seriously…and using it to keep users session times through the roof. 

All new active outbound hyperlinks on any MySpace page are converted to filter through the domain msplinks.com. Each link is then redirected to the original destination. 

The masked links now look like this: 

http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LndpbGZlcmGH1Jj 

I saw it initially applied to comments that I was leaving, suggesting that they were aiming to crack down on comment SPAM in particular. Over the past month, I’ve seen it applied to every outgoing link. Even 3rd party hosted photos, using services such as photobucket, do not link directly to Photobucket.com, but instead link indirectly through the Myspace-controlled URL. 

The danger that I see in this brings up an interesting debate. Prior to employing this tactic, users could simply hover their cursor over a link and read the URL in the browser. I feel that most users are savvy enough to know this and use this method for checking out where their “friend” is linking them before clicking on the link. With this new system in place, users don’t have the information to make that choice. They have to trust that Myspace is monitoring outgoing links and if Myspace deems it inappropriate or harmful, then the link will not resolve to the site. Less Web 2.0 and more 1984. 

Aside from attempting to prevent SPAM and harmful links on other sites, there are alot of pro’s for Myspace in controlling outbound links. Obviously they can better track their outgoing traffic and possibly even keep users on the site longer by not giving them the information about the destination URL that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. From this they can discover which 3rd party services (widgets, skins…) are most popular and integrate their own versions. If they wanted to take it even further, they could block access to these 3rd party sites…and in that case they could even block links to potentially threatening (competing) niche social networks which are emerging. 

Is this the strategic decision that seems so right to marketers but actually causes users to ultimately abandon it?