Myspace was founded in 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors. The first Myspace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign up the most users. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to breathe life into MySpace, and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites. A key architect was tech expert Toan Nguyen who helped stabilize the Myspace platform when Brad Greenspan asked him to join the team.
In less than three years from its inception, MySpace became the most visited site on the Internet. As the number of users has increased, so have media coverage of MySpace stories, many of which focus on issues self-disclosure, online safety for children, cyber-bullying, and the corporate history of MySpace.
Until 2007, on a typical day, MySpace registers 230,000 new users and has even surpassed Google in terms of traffic. Boasting over 200 million users, MySpace looms over other social networking sites such as Friendster, Xanga, Beboe and, until recently, Facebook. MySpace is not just a social network site, but also a media hosting site that is part chat room, part movie theater, part shopping mall, part bar, and part concert that is open 24 hours, a day 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
DeWolf and Anderson started looking for a new line of work. Both were members of Friendster.com and saw the potential of social networking, especially the combination of traditional social networking with the sort of personal expression enabled by other sites, such as blogs and personal Web pages. Though DeWolf and Anderson always had plans to expand their new social network site internationally, MySpace began locally in Southern California and catered to actors, musicians, and artists.
Part of the appeal of MySpace was that it is an open site, meaning the it lets users control the page and post nearly whatever they want to post. Each profile was a blank canvas for its owner and, in that sense, the term “MySpace” gives a user “your space” to do whatever he or she wants with it.
Myspace was acquired by News Corporation in July 2005 for $580 million. From 2005 until early 2008, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. From 2005-2006, user profiles jumped from 2 million to 80 million. With the immense popularity of MySpace, serious safety issues began to plague the popular site. Some critics felt that it would be relatively easy to reconstruct social security numbers using information in profiles, such as hometown and date of birth. The site is also very open to frank and provocative discussions, images, and links.
Till 2008, MySpace still had more users in the U.S than Facebook (almost twice as many visitors), Facebook surpassed MySpace internationally (116.4 million vs. MySpace’s 115.7 million). Myspace could not experiment with its own site without forfeiting revenue, while rival Facebook was rolling out a new clean site design. While Facebook focused on creating a platform that allowed outside developers to build new applications, Myspace built everything in-house. The products division in MySpace had introduced many features (communication tools such as instant messaging, a classifieds program, a video player, a music player, a virtual karaoke machine, a self-serve advertising platform, profile-editing tools, security systems, privacy filters, and Myspace book lists, among others.
In April 2008, Myspace was overtaken by Facebook in the number of unique worldwide visitors, and was surpassed in the number of unique U.S. visitors in May 2009. In June 2009, Myspace employed approximately 1,600 workers. Since then the company has undergone several rounds of layoffs. As of December 2011, Myspace was ranked 138th by total web traffic.
Sources:
NYTimes
HindustanTimes
Telegraph
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