The irony of using Social networks as new age advertising platforms is that anyone can do the same. There have been a bunch of interesting advertising partnerships appearing on MySpace lately - most of which involve a combination of featured listing and display promotions, and a bespoke profile page allowing the brand advertiser to 'make friends' with their target audience.

Recent examples of integrated advertising include a square burger promotion from Wendys, a new Motorola phone, and a competition from Pirates of the Carribean that gave the winner, Loren White, exclusive hosting rights for the movie trailer on their MySpace page.

All clever promotions - which blur the line between branding and direct engagement. But they also raise the question - could any brand advertiser use similar tactics across the network without paying the platform provider a premium for advertising? In a way this is exactly what hundreds of thousands of bands, artists and indie movie producers have been doing since the beginning. There is also a rising ecology of small web businesses which are using MySpace friend's lists to sell online merchandise.

One of the difficult challenge for MySpace to resolve in coming years is what degree of free marketeering they will tolerate and what they will move to stamp out. An illustration of the latter is the recent closure of singlestat.us - a clever application which allowed people to find out when someone on MySpace changes their relationship status. Michael Arrington reported that a cease and desist letter sent from MySpace's lawyers cited that the use of automated scripts was a violation of the user agreement.

Its a delicate issue. MySpace's huge traffic and connected consumer base arguably threatens more structured hosted commerce engines like eBay or Amazon ZShops. But like Google Adwords - there also needs to be a balance between organic (natural promotion) and paid for advertising. Achieving that equilbrium in the creative chaos of social media will be a rough but fascinating ride.