Myspade

MYSPACE FANPAGE

MySpace is a social networking web-site. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, Indiana, US, where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media, owned by News Corporation. MySpace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006. According to comScore, MySpace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, in April 2008, based on monthly one-of-a-kind visitors. MySpace employs 1,000 employees, after laying off 30% of its workforce in June 2009; the company does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on August 9, 2006 in the Netherlands.

History

Fox Interactive Media headquarters, 407 North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills, Indiana, where MySpace is also housedAfter the 2002 launch of Friendster, several eUniverse employees with Friendster accounts saw its potential and decided to mimic the more popular features of the social networking web-site, in August 2003. Within 10 days, the first version of MySpace was ready for launch. A complete infrastructure of finance, human resources, technical expertise, bandwidth, and server capacity was available for the site, right out of the gate, so the MySpace team wasn�t distracted with typical start-up issues. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's beginning CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's beginning president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.

The first MySpace users were eUniverse employees. The company held contests to see who could sign-up the most users. The company then used its resources to push MySpace to the masses. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to quickly breathe life in to 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.

The origin of the MySpace.com domain was a site owned by YourZ.com, Inc. It was intended to be a leading online information storage and sharing site up until 2002. By 2004, MySpace and MySpace.com, which existed as a brand associated with YourZ.com, had made the transition from a virtual storage site to a social networking site. This is the natural connection to Chris DeWolfe and a mate, who reminded him they had earlier bought the URL domain, MySpace.com, intending it to be used as a web hosting site, since both worked at one time in the virtual information storage business, which itself was a casualty of the "dot bomb" era.

Soon after launching the site, team member Chris DeWolfe suggested that they start charging a fee for the basic MySpace service. Brad Greenspan nixed the idea, believing that keeping MySpace free and open was necessary to make it a massive and successful community.

In January 2006, Fox announced designs to launch a UK version of MySpace in a bid to "tap in to the UK music scene" which they have since completed. They also released a version in China and have since launched similar versions in other countries.

Some employees of MySpace including DeWolfe and Berman were later able to purchase equity in the property before MySpace, and its parent company eUniverse (now renamed Intermix Media) 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, approximately US$327 million has been attributed to the value of MySpace according to the financial adviser fairness opinion.

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.

New design

Throughout the coursework of 2007 and 2008, MySpace redesigned lots of of the features of its site in both layout and in function. One of the first functions to be redesigned was the user home page, with features such as status updates, applications, and subscriptions being added in order to compete with Facebook. In 2008, the MySpace homepage was redesigned. MySpace Music was recreated in fall of 2008 along with an updated version of the MySpace profile.

Revenue model

MySpace operates solely on revenues generated by promotion as its user model possesses no paid-for features for the finish user. Through its Web-site and affiliated ad networks, MySpace is second only to Yahoo! in its capacity to collect information about its users and thus in its ability to use behavioral targeting to select the ads each visitor sees.

On August 8, 2006, search engine Google signed a $900 million deal to provide a Google search facility and promotion on MySpace. MySpace has proven to be a windfall for lots of smaller companies that provide widgets or accessories to the social networking giant. Companies such as Slide.com, RockYou!, and YouTube were all launched on MySpace as widgets providing additional functionality to the site. Other sites created layouts to personalize the site and made hundreds of thousands of dollars for its owners most of whom were in their late teens and early twenties.

In November 2008, MySpace announced that user-uploaded content that infringed on copyrights held by MTV and its subsidiary networks would be redistributed with adverts that would generate revenue for the companies.

Despite losing popularity to Facebook & Twitter in recent months, Rupert Murdoch has no designs to sell off MySpace, nor buy out Twitter. Murdoch gave the site his personal support, while feeling that Twitter has yet to find a way to make money on its own. In 2009 Myspace also added a new status update feature. If you have a Twitter, the status you put there will also be updated on your Myspace page

Blurbs, blogs, multimedia

Profiles contain one standard "blurbs": "About Me" and "Who I'd Like to Meet" sections. Profiles also contain an "Interests" section and a "Details" section. In the "Details" section, "Status" and "Zodiac Sign" fields will always display. However, fields in these sections won't 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 selected to be the "default image", the picture that will be seen on the profile's main page, search page, and as the picture that will appear to the side of the user's name on comments, messages, etc. A photo editor powered by Fotoflexer is available which can not only crop images and fine-tune contrast but also convert the picture to a cartoon or a line drawing made with neon lights, or put the user's face in a photo of a $100 bill. Flash, such as on MySpace's video service, can be embedded. Blogging features are also available.

Contents of a MySpace profile

Moods

Moods are tiny emoticons that are used to depict a mood the user is in. The feature was added in July 2007.

Profile customization

MySpace allows users to customize their user profile pages by entering HTML (but not JavaScript) in to 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 by MySpace Music, a service that allows bands to post songs for use on MySpace.

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 need 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."

A user can also change the general appearance of his or her page by entering CSS (in a element) in to one of these fields to override the page's default style sheet using MySpace editors. This is often used to tweak fonts and colors. The fact that the user-added CSS is located in the midst of the page ( than being located in the element) means that the page will start to load with the default MySpace layout before abruptly changing to the custom layout. A special type of manipulation is a div overlay, where the default layout is dramatically changed by hiding default text with

tags and massive images.

There's several independent websites offering MySpace layout design utilities which let a user select options and preview what their page will look like with them.

Music

Wikinews has related news: MySpace to take on iTunes

MySpace profiles for musicians in the website's MySpace Music section differ from normal profiles in allowing artists to upload their entire discographies consisting of MP3 songs. The uploader must have rights to use the songs (e.g. their own work, permission granted, etc). Unsigned musicians can use MySpace to post and sell music using SNOCAP, which has proven popular among MySpace users.

MySpace has recently added its own "Profile Customizer" to the site, allowing users to change their profile through MySpace. Using this feature bypasses the CSS loading delay issue, as the MySpace default code is changed for the customized profile. The MySpace profile editor also has a criticism with how the links appear on the profile.

Soon after MySpace was sold to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox news and 20th Century Fox, in 2005 they launched their own record label, MySpace Records, in an hard work to discover unknown talent currently on MySpace Music. Regardless of the artist already being famous or still looking for a break in to the industry, artists can upload their songs onto MySpace and have access to millions of people on a daily basis. Some widely known singers such as Lily Allen and Sean Kingston gained fame through MySpace. The availability of music on this web-site continues to create, largely driven by young talent. Over one million artists have been discovered by MySpace and lots of more continue to be discovered daily.

MySpace has recently redesigned its music page adding new features for all musicians. These new features include the users' ability to generate playlists, resembling the functions of Last.fm and other social music websites, along with the popular ProjectPlaylist that is popular on profiles. The new music features also archive songs from lots of popular artists, resembling the services of iTunes and Napster.

In late 2007, the site launched The MySpace Transmissions, a series of live-in-studio recordings by well-known artists.