Myspace

MySpace.com

MySpace logo
File:Tom profile.jpg Typical MySpace profile (MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson's profile shown here)
Type of site	Social network service
Headquarters	Santa Monica, California, USA
Owner	News Corporation
Created by	Tom Anderson, and Chris DeWolfe
URL	http://www.myspace.com
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Required

MySpace is a homosexual website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos of penises, music and videos. MySpace also features an internal search engine and an internal e-mail system. It is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, USA, while its parent company is headquartered in New York City. According to Alexa Internet, it is currently the world's sixth most popular English-language website, the sixth most popular website in any language, and the third most popular website in the United States, though it has topped the chart on various weeks (note it is possible that other websites have a greater number of unique visitors). The service has gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80 percent of visits to online social networking websites. It has become an increasingly influential part of contemporary popular culture, especially in English speaking countries. The company employs 300 staff, is owned by News Corporation, and does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. With the 100 millionth account being created on August 9, 2006 and a news story claiming 106 million accounts on September 8, 2006, the site reportedly attracts new registrations at a rate of 230,000 per day.

History

The current MySpace service was founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson (an alumnus of both the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles), the current president and CEO, Chris DeWolfe (a graduate of University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business), and a small team of programmers. It was partially owned by Intermix Media, which was bought in July 2005 for US$580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and other media enterprises). Of this amount, approx. US$327m has been attributed to the value of MySpace according to the financial advisor fairness opinion [2].

The corporate history of MySpace as well as the status of Tom Anderson as a MySpace founder has been a matter of some public dispute.

In January 2006, Fox announced plans to launch a UK version of MySpace in a bid to "tap into the UK music scene" which they have since done (see MySpace International). They also plan to launch in China and possibly other countries.

Contents of a MySpace profile

Blurbs, blogs, multimedia

Profiles contain two standard "blurbs": "About Me" and "Who I'd Like to Meet" sections. Profiles also contain an "Interests" section and a "Details" section. However, fields in these sections will not be displayed if members do not fill them in. Profiles also contain a blog with standard fields for content, emotion, and media. MySpace also supports uploading images. One of the images can be chosen to be the "default image," the image that will be seen on the profile's main page, search page, and as the image that will appear to the side of the user's name on comments, messages, etc. Flash, such as on MySpace's video service, can be embedded. Also there is a "details" section which provides vital information on the user such as his/her race, religion, and sexual orientation.

MySpace will start sending to its users, living in certain U.S. regions, online alerts in order to help find missing children. Hemanshu Nigam, the Chief Executive Officer of MySpace, said that MySpace has been working with several partners as well as with law enforcement, having the aim of finding all possible ways that would help protect children of the United States from sex offenders. He also mentioned that MySpace will provide technology, which the entire industry would benefit from.

MySpace will enable AMBER alerts and for this reason the site made a partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. MySpace now asks its subscribers to register using a valid e-mail address. This is part of the website's safe program. The e-mail will allow law enforcement to hunt down possible predators. A verification e-mail will be sent to new users. The e-mail will have a link, which the user must click in order to verify his or her identity.

MySpace came to terms with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp. with a goal to develop a new technology, called Sentinel Safe. It will let the site to search state and federal databases and spot and delete profiles of registered users which are defined as sex offenders.

Friend Space

The User's Friends Space contains a count of a user's friends, a "Top Friends" area, and a link to view all of the user's friends. Users can choose a certain number of friends to be displayed on their profile in the "Top Friends" area. The "Top Friends" used to be restricted to eight friends. People bypassed this limitation by using third-party tools to emulate a "Top X" friends. Currently, MySpace allows 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, or 24 friends to be displayed in the "Top Friends" area. Before this, the friends list was 8 people in order of the friend ID.

Comments

Below the User's Friends Space (by default) is the "comments" section, wherein the user's friends may leave comments for all viewers to read. MySpace users have the option to delete any comment and/or require all comments to be approved before posting. If a user's account is deleted, every comment left on other profiles by that user will be deleted, and replaced with the comment saying "This Profile No Longer Exists".

Profile customization

MySpace allows users to customize their user profile pages by entering HTML (but not JavaScript) into such areas as "About Me", "I'd Like to Meet", and "Interests". Videos, and flash-based content can be included this way. Users also have the option to add music to their profile pages via MySpace Music, a service that allows bands to post songs for use on MySpace.

A user can also change the general appearance of his page by entering CSS (in a <style> ... </style> element) into one of these fields to override the page's default style sheet. This is often used to tweak fonts and colors, but it has its limitations due to poorly-structured HTML used on the profile page. The fact that the user-added CSS is located in the middle of the page (rather than being located in the <head> element) means that the page will begin to load with the default MySpace layout before abruptly changing to the custom layout.

There are several independent web sites offering MySpace layout design utilities which let a user select options and preview what his page will look like with them.

Music & Musicians

There are two main types of user profiles on MySpace, a general friends profile with the ability to add at least one favourite song to a profile, the other is specifically for musicians.

The musicians profile allows an uploading of up to four MP3 songs which must either be the artists own work or the original copyright owner must have given permission to upload the music. This has proved very popular with musicians world wide and of every genre. MySpace music profiles provide an instant and simple way for music lovers to listen to, befriend, keep up to date with gigs and comment on their chosen bands, it is also a way of record labels to investigate new up and coming bands from the comfort of their offices without having to get out to watch a gig to see how many followers the band already have. MySpace music has taken away many of the barriers that previously existed for new musicians trying to reach their potential audience, it has been a way of cutting out the middle man. The well known band Arctic Monkeys initially used the spam feature of myspace to attract hundreds of new music fans before being signed to Domino Records.

Record Labels have now realised the potential of having a myspace page to show their presence in this modern day Internet based phenomenon, also record shops, music lawyers and virtually any organisation related to the music industry use myspace as a free base to tout for new business. Other, not for profit, organisations such as Brum Beat have made one stop bases on MySpace music to promote new unsigned music acts, this counters the problem that while there may be hundreds of bands in one city or area, the only way to search for a band is complex and doesn't always generate what you might expect.

Nightclubs and Dj's also have music profiles where they can upload their Dj mixes or Dance Music records, surprisingly they sometimes appear to be more popular than traditional musicians.

MySpace features

Software

The company's servers are all running Microsoft IIS 6.0 on the Windows Server 2003 OS.

Bulletins

Bulletins are posts that are posted on to a "bulletin board" for everyone on a MySpace user's friends list to see. Bulletins can be useful for notifying an entire, but usually a portion of the friends list (depending on how many friends are added), without resorting to messaging users individually. Some users choose to use Bulletins as a service for delivering chain messages about politics, religion, or anything else. Bulletins are deleted after ten days.

Groups

MySpace has a Groups feature which allows a group of users to share a common page and message board. Groups can be created by anybody, and the moderator of the group can choose for anyone to join, or to approve or deny requests to join.

Language editions

Since early 2006 MySpace has offered the option to access the service in different regional versions. The options offered are: Global site, Australia, France (currently in beta), Germany (currently in beta), Ireland, Japan (currently in beta), Spain (currently in beta), UK, and US (although this is in fact identical to the "global" site).

The alternative regional versions present automated content according to locality (e.g. UK users see other UK users as "Cool New People", and UK oriented events and adverts, etc.), offer local languages other than English, or accommodate the regional differences in spelling and conventions in the English-speaking world (e.g. United States: "favorites", mm/dd/yyyy; the rest of the world: "favourites", dd/mm/yyyy).

MySpace IM

Main article: MySpaceIM

In early 2006, MySpace introduced MySpaceIM, an instant messenger that uses one's MySpace account as a screen name. A MySpace user logs in to the client using the same e-mail associated with his or her MySpace account. Unlike other parts of MySpace, MySpaceIM is stand-alone software for Microsoft Windows. Users who use MySpaceIM get instant notification of new MySpace messages, friend requests, and comments.

MySpace Mobile

American mobile phone provider Helio released a series of mobile phones in early 2006 that can utilize a service known as MySpace Mobile to access and edit one's profile and communicate with, and view the profiles of, other members. Additionally, UIEvolution in partnership with MySpace developed a mobile version of MySpace for a wider range of carriers, including Cingular. MySpace already featured SMS alerts on Cingular.

Controversy over corporate history

Spam / Tom Anderson PR

In September 2006, a lengthy article written by journalism student Trent Lapinski, "MySpace: The Business of Spam 2.0", was published by the Silicon Valley gossip blog, Valleywag (a Gawker Media property). The article (which was claimed to have been "professionally fact-checked") recounted a detailed corporate history of MySpace, alleging that what was now regarded as a social networking website had been originally designed as a spam delivery system aimed at exploiting Friendster, and had initially gained popularity through an intensive mass email campaign rather than word of mouth[3]. Amongst other claims was the assertion that Tom Anderson had originally been hired as a copyeditor and his "founder" and "first friend" status was a public relations invention. Lapinski suggested that News Corp. had attempted to suppress the publication of the history. News Corp. declined to publicly comment on the article.

Brad Greenspan / The Free My Space Report

In October 2006, Brad Greenspan (the former Chairman, CEO and largest individual shareholder of Intermix Media and who also claims to be the true "founder of MySpace") launched a website and published "The Free MySpace Report" that called for the SEC, the DoJ and the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance to investigate News Corp's acquisition of MySpace as "one of the largest merger and acquisition scandals in U.S. history" [4]. The report's main allegation is that News Corp. should have valued MySpace at US$20bn rather than US$327mn, and had, in effect, defrauded Intermix shareholders through an unfair deal process[5]. The report received a mixed response from financial commentators in the press [6][7]. An initial lawsuit led by Greenspan challenging the acquisition was dismissed by a judge[8].

Greenspan's report also states that the MySpace program code had originally been the brainchild of an Intermix/eUniverse programmer named Toan Nguyen who made the breakthrough technical contributions to the project[9].

Valleywag speculated that Greenspan was likely a key source for Lapinski's September article[10]. As of November 2006, Lapinski was listedas a staff member of CensorSpace.com - a blog focused on alleged excessive censorship on MySpace and other websites, and which was founded by Greenspan.

Criticism

Accessibility

The registration process for a new MySpace account includes a visual CAPTCHA test, with no alternative method for the visually impaired. As a result, people with blindness or visual impairment are prevented from fully participating.

Since most MySpace pages are designed by individuals with little HTML experience, a very large proportion of pages do not satisfy the criteria for valid HTML or CSS laid down by the W3C[11]. Poorly formatted code can cause accessibility problems for those using software such as screen readers. Indeed, the MySpace home page, as of 30th December 2006, fails HTML validation with 268 errors.[12]

Furthermore, MySpace is set up so that anyone can customize the layout and colors of their profile page with virtually no restrictions, provided that the advertisements aren't covered up by CSS or using other means. As MySpace users are usually not skilled web developers, this can cause further problems. Poorly constructed MySpace profiles could potentially freeze up web browsers due to malformed CSS coding, or as a result of users placing many high bandwidth objects such as videos, graphics, and Flash in their profiles (sometimes multiple videos and soundfiles are automatically played at the same time when a profile loads). PC World magazine cited this as its main reason for naming MySpace as #1 in its list of 25 worst web sites ever.

In addition, new features have been gradually added. This, and the increasing number of MySpace members, leads to an increase in used bandwidth. This increase in usage sometimes slows down the servers and may result in a "Server Too Busy" error message for some users who are on at peak hours, "Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred. This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group.", or a variety of any other error messages throughout the day .

MySpace and professionalism

The Chicago Tribune's RedEye printed an article concerning MySpace and an individual's search for employment. It was argued that young college graduates compromise their chances of starting careers because of the content they post onto their profiles. For instance, a visitor does not need an account to browse for users using information that is readily available on resumes and applications, such as a postal code and age. A potential employer can utilize information provided by the applicant on MySpace's search engine. Thus, the employer may not hire a highly qualified candidate because he or she maintains an account suggesting rambunctious behaviour. Moreover, employees were said to be putting their careers at risk because they maintain blogs that criticize their respective companies and organizations.

Security

In October 2005, a flaw in the MySpace's site design was exploited by a user only known as "Samy" to create the world's first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. MSNBC has also reported that MySpace is a "hotbed" for spyware, and that infection rates are rising because of MySpace. In addition to this, the customization of user pages currently allows the injection of certain HTML which can be crafted to form a phishing user profile. More recently, there has been spam on bulletins that has been the result of phishing. Users find their MySpace homepage with bulletins they didn't post, realizing later they had been phished. The bulletin consists of an advertisement that provides a link to a a fake login screen, tricking people into typing in their MySpace e-mail and password.

Other security fears regarding profile content itself are also present. For example, the embedding of videos inherently allows all of the format's abilities and functions to be used on a page. A prime example of this surfaced in December 2006, when embedded QuickTime videos were shown to contain hyperlinks to JavaScript files, which would be run simply by a user visiting an 'infected' profile page, or even in some cases by simply viewing a user's 'about me' elsewhere on the site. Users who entered their login information into a fake login bar that appeared would then become 'infected', and their account would be used to spam other members, thus spreading the infection.

Child safety

The minimum age to register an account on MySpace has been reduced to 14. Profiles with ages set to 14 to 15 years are automatically private. Users whose ages are set at 16 or over have the option to restrict their profiles, and the option of allowing certain personal data to be restricted to people other than those on their friends list. Accessing the full profile of, or messaging someone when their account is set to "private" (or if under 16) is restricted to a MySpace user's direct friends. However, children are capable of lying about their ages to bypass restrictions.

MySpace often has problems with profile identity theft. These are profiles containing the pictures and sometimes information of someone else's profile. These stolen profiles are commonly used to advertise websites. MySpace will delete these profiles if the victim verifies their identity and points out the profile via e-mail.

Recently, MySpace has been the focus of a number of news reports stating that teenagers have found ways around the restrictions set by MySpace, and have been the target of online predators. In response, MySpace has given assurances to parents that the website is safe for people of all ages. Beginning in late June 2006, MySpace users whose ages are set over 18 could no longer be able to add users whose ages are set from 14 to 15 years as friends unless they already know the user's full name or email address. Some 3rd party Internet Safety companies like Social Shield have launched online communities for parents concerned about their child's safety on MySpace.

In June 2006, 16-year-old Katherine Lester flew to the Middle East, mainly to the Palestinian West Bank after having tricked her parents into getting her a passport in order to be with a 20-year-old man she met through MySpace. US officials in Jordan persuaded the teen to turn around and go home .

Though Myspace has established rules on child safety, but were not enforced as well as they should have been. Until January 17th, 2007, Myspace had been letting many underage users on Myspace, but began cracking down on the rules.

In December 2006 MySpace announced new measures to protect children from known sex offenders. Although precise details were not given they said that "tools" would be implemented to prevent known sex offenders from the USA creating a MySpace profile.

Social and cultural

Dave Itzkoff, in the June 2006 issue of Playboy magazine, related his experiences experimenting with membership in MySpace. Among his criticisms is that the distance afforded by the Internet emboldens members, such as females who feature photos of themselves in little clothing on their profile pages, to behave in ways that they would not behave in person, and that this duplicity undercuts the central philosophy of MySpace, which is to bring people together. Itzkoff also references the addictive, time-consuming nature of the site, mentioning that Playboy Playmate and MySpace member Julie McCullough, who was the first to respond to his Add request, refers to the site as "cybercrack". Itzkoff claims that MySpace gives many people access to a member’s life, without giving the time needed to maintain such relationships, and that such relationships do not possess the depth of in-person relationships.

Itzkoff is particularly critical of the disturbing and fraudulent behavior of people who can contact a member, unsolicited, as when he was contacted by someone expressing a desire to socialize and date, but whose blog (to which Itzkoff was directed via subsequent emails) turned out to be a solicitation for a series of commercial porn sites. Itzkoff is also critical of more subtle commercial solicitations on the site, such as the banner ads and links to profiles and video clips that turn out to be commercials for new 20th Century Fox films. Itzkoff also observes that MySpace’s much-celebrated music section is heavily weighted in favor of record labels rather than breakthrough musicians.

Itzkoff also relates criticism from another person he calls "Judas", who asserts that while the goal of attempting to bring together people who might not otherwise associate with one another in real life may seem honorable, it violates a social contract that exists when people interact in person, which renders MySpace nothing more than a passing fad:

There will come a moment when, like deer quivering and flicking up their ears toward a noiseless noise in the woods, the first adopters will suddenly realize they’re spending their time blogging and adding and gawking at the same alarming photos an army of 14-year olds are and, quick as deer, they’ll dash to the next trend. And before you know it, we’ll all follow.

Musicians' rights and MySpace Terms of Use Agreement

Until June 2006, there was a concern amongst musicians, artists, and bands on MySpace such as songwriter Billy Bragg owing to the fine print within the user agreement that read, "You hereby grant to MySpace.com a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services". The fine print brought particular concern as the agreement was being made with Murdoch's News Corporation. Billy Bragg brought the issue to the attention of the media during the first week of June 2006. Jeff Berman, a MySpace spokesman swiftly responded by saying, "Because the legalese has caused some confusion, we are at work revising it to make it very clear that MySpace is not seeking a license to do anything with an artist's work other than allow it to be shared in the manner the artist intends".

By June 27, 2006 MySpace had amended the user agreement with, "MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, 'Content') that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose".

Blocking

Many schools and public libraries in the United States and the United Kingdom have restricted access to MySpace because it has become "such a haven for student gossip and malicious comments".

A Catholic school in New Jersey has even prohibited students from using MySpace at home, an action made to protect students from online predators as claimed by the school, although experts questioned the legality of such a ban.

On July 28 2006, the United States House of Representatives passed a controversial bill requiring libraries and schools receiving certain types of federal funding (E-rate) to prevent unsupervised minors from using chat rooms and social networking websites, such as MySpace. This bill, known as the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (DOPA), was approved by a 410-15 vote in the United States House of Representatives but was not brought to a vote in the United States Senate. Since the Congressional session of its introduction expired, the bill must be reintroduced in either chamber to be voted upon again.

Legal issues

In May 2006, Long Island, New York teenagers Shaun Harrison and Saverio Mondelli were charged with illegal computer access and attempted extortion of MySpace, after both had allegedly hacked into the site to steal the personal information of MySpace users before threatening to share the secrets of how they broke into the website unless MySpace paid them $150,000. Both teens were arrested by undercover Los Angeles police detectives posing as MySpace employees.

Celebrities on MySpace

MySpace has led to the creation of MySpace celebrities, popular individuals who have attracted hundreds of thousands of "friends", which may lead to coverage in other media. The June 2006 issue of Playboy magazine, for example, featured a "Women of MySpace" nude pictorial (though ironically, an article somewhat critical of the website ran in the same issue). Through MySpace, such people are able to distribute information regarding their activities, events they are hosting, or projects they are working on (e.g. albums or clothing lines). Though some of these individuals have remained only Internet celebrities, others have been able to jump to television, magazines, and radio. One example is Christine "ForBiddeN" Dolce's appearance on The Tyra Banks Show and her own Playboy pictorial in the October 2006 issue.

Furthermore, MySpace's music section has helped many amateur bands progress. One illustrative example is English band Arctic Monkeys, who owe some of their success to the publicity that MySpace generated for them. When asked about the popularity of the band's MySpace website in an interview with Prefix magazine, the band pointed out that they did not even know what MySpace was, and that their page had originally been created by their fans. It has been claimed that Pop artist Lily Allen's new fame is also due in part to her being promoted on MySpace but Lily herself denies this. In response to an interview question on Triple J, Australia Lily stated, "The way it's been portrayed in the media, is that you were almost like discovered by MySpace; how accurate is that?" Lily responded "Not accurate at all, I had a record deal before I set up my MySpace account so, erm, that's ... couldn't really be further from the truth."

YouTube

YouTube first appeared on the web in early 2005, and it quickly gained popularity on MySpace due to MySpace members who embedded YouTube videos in their MySpace profiles. Realizing the competitive threat to the new MySpace Videos service, MySpace banned embedded YouTube videos from its user profiles. MySpace users widely protested the ban, prompting MySpace to lift the ban shortly thereafter. But since then links from each embedded video on MySpace to the home pages of the video on YouTube have been blocked making it more difficult to find the same videos on YouTube's website.

Since then YouTube has become one of the fastest-growing websites on the World Wide Web, outgrowing MySpace's reach according to Alexa Internet. In July 2006 several news organizations reported that YouTube had overtaken MySpace. In a September 2006 investor meeting, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin claimed that virtually all modern Web applications (naming YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket) were really just "driven off the back of MySpace" and that "we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them".

Other

• On August 8, 2006, search engine Google signed a $900 million deal to provide a Google search facility and advertising on MySpace.

See also

• List of social networking websites
• MySpace Records
• The MySpace Movie
• Social network
• Business network
• Social software
• MySpaceIM
• MyDeathSpace.com
• Internet phenomenon

Further reading

• Dodero, Camille, "Lost in MySpace: Log on, tune in, and hook up with 22 million people online", The Boston Phoenix, July 22-28, 2005.
• Dodero, Camille, "You and your tech-chic: As of 2006, new media isn’t just for geeks anymore", The Boston Phoenix, December 20, 2006.

External links

• MySpace.com MySpace Homepage
• Tom Anderson MySpace co-Founder Homepage