Wired On Friday:American superhero comics are, these days, rather aware that they've slipped from modishness. And so, in that desperate way, they are constantly peppering their scripts with trendy cultural references. This month, an alternative journalist bombards Captain America with questions: "Do you know what MySpace is?", she asks with a fashionable sneer, writes Danny O'Brien.

But then again, who really does know what MySpace is? Those who don't use it are hard put to comprehend its attraction. Stumble on one of its garish web pages, and one struggles to guess why millions of ordinary people choose to create their online home there. Of those who do use it, a tiny fraction know the strength behind it: Rupert Murdoch's News International. It's very hard to see both sides: the business attraction and the consumer attraction at the same time.

That mutual blindness means another question keeps rearing its head both in MySpace's column inches in the business sections, and the reams of commentary online. Just whose space is MySpace?

The space in MySpace was originally set aside for musicians: the site's first market was for Los Angeles bands and their fans. Musicians could upload their music to their MySpace homepage and their followers could show their loyalty by signing up as public "friends" of the band.

When MySpace became a News International property, many musicians began to squint a little closer at MySpace's terms of use. In the original version, it appeared as though uploading their music also meant they signed over the rights to the recording to News International. New MySpace resident Billy Bragg was most upset and the wording was "corrected".

But MySpace the company still exerts an invisible power over MySpace the public space. Like an intrusive landlord, few individual tenants complain enough to change anything, but the patterns are worrying, and not good for the neighbourhood.

The popularity of MySpace has led to a thriving secondary market in baubles that its users can embed in their web pages to jazz up their surroundings. Many MySpace sites are enhanced by "widgets" created by other companies, and paid for by their own advertising deals.

MySpace the site gains by the attractiveness and ease of use of these extras. But MySpace the News International company seems a little annoyed by others taking advantage of their space.

Recently, some widget companies have found their widgets blocked from being used on MySpace web pages . It's hard to know exactly what News International's motives might be for doing this. As with many modern Net companies, MySpace puts on a friendly exterior, but is remarkably tight-lipped about technical changes like this. Some blame the blocking of widgets on an attempt to defend MySpace from arcane hacking attacks. Others are more conspiratorial, pointing to the fact that one of the blacked widget companies is run by an ex-founder of MySpace.

Assuming that MySpace's filtering of third-parties isn't just a technical blip, does it matter if somebody else is making money from MySpace? These extra gizmos are not exactly bleeding cash away from the company. If anything, they add to MySpace's long-term attractiveness to its users. It's like milk companies complaining about milkshake powder making money off them.

It also weakens the faith of MySpace's real customers, the millions who freely populate its pages, that they will be able to continue unmolested.

Right now, barely any of them are aware of MySpace's corporate existence. For most of them, the true face of MySpace is "Tom", the cheery (and real) figurehead who is automatically given to new members as their first "friend" to demonstrate how the social networking service works.

The more MySpace interferes in how its users can adapt the service to their own ends, the more it risks turning "Tom" into an interfering overlord - and leading to mass exodus from the site.

Whenever MySpace is mentioned, old and wizened net veterans will frequently pooh-pooh it by suggesting it is just the new "Geocities".

Like MySpace, Geocities was a centrally run website whose selling point was that anyone could create their own homepage on its servers. At its height of popularity, Geocities boasted 3.5 million inhabitants, 32 million pages, and a 19 million-strong readership. Yahoo!, like News International, jumped at the chance to buy such a valuable asset.

Within a matter of months, it was nothing, killed by intrusive advertisements, user outrage at Yahoo!'s terms of service (which were eerily similar to the pre-Billy Bragg MySpace EULA), and, most of all, the heavy-handed attempts at control by its new owners.