Photobucket.com has emerged from a very public battle with MySpace with the ban on their widgets being lifted for MySpace users.

Liz Gannes on GigaOM has a very good summary of what happened in this case and also points out that it is not the first time that MySpace has decided to “censor” content.

When I heard Shawn Gold, CMO of MySpace, speak at ad:tech earlier in the year, he attributed much of their massive growth and success in overtaking embedded rival Friendster.com by allowing users to do whatever they wanted, whereas Friendster was very restrictive. However, since they launched the company obviously Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive has acquired MySpace and he is pegging the shining star of his consumer generated media portfolio to achieve $1 billion USD in revenue by 2008.

At the end of Liz Ganne’s post she quotes Friendster’s new pitch:

“A friendlier Friendster, widgets, new tools and all, has re-emerged in 2006 and 2007 as a global leader in online social networking. While MySpace is looking less and less like the free-to-be-me place it was circa 2005 and 2006.”

They could be dreaming but is it possible that the influence of MySpace’s new owners will cause enough dissatisfaction to cause a widespread move of users back to Friendster? Probably not, but the decidedly unfriendly attitude MySpace is displaying does not fit well with the web 2.0/mash up world.