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What
is MySpace?
MySpace.com (or MySpace) is a free service that uses
the Internet for online communication through an
interactive network of photos, weblogs, user profiles,
e-mail, web forums, and groups, as well as other media
formats. This all-inclusive service is sometimes
called a social networking interface. MySpace is a
very active site, and additions and new features are
being added constantly. ...
MySpace is a social networking website offering an
interactive, user-submitted network of friends,
personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and
videos. It is headquartered in Beverly Hills,
California, USA while its parent company, News
Corporation, is headquartered in New York City.
According to Alexa Internet, it is currently the
world's fifth most popular English-language website
and the fifth 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(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% of visits to online social networking
websites. It has become an increasingly influential
part of contemporary popular culture, especially in
English speaking countries.
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.
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.
MySpace profiles for musicians are different than
normal profiles in that artists are allowed to upload
up to four 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, which has proven popular among MySpace
users.
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, commonly called the "Top
8". People bypassed this limitation by using
third-party tools to emulate a "Top X" friends.
Currently, MySpace allows four, eight, twelve,
sixteen, twenty, or twenty-four friends to be
displayed in the "Top Friends" area. Before this, the
friends list was eight people.
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 allows the user to provide
personal information on the user such as his/her race,
religion, and sexual orientation.
Since early 2006 MySpace has offered the option to
access the service in different regional versions. The
options offered are: Global site, Australia, Canada
(in English), Canada (in French), France (currently in
beta), Germany (currently in beta), Ireland, Japan
(currently in beta), Spain (currently in beta), Mexico
(currently in beta), UK, and US (although this last 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).
The company employs 300 staff and does not disclose
revenues or profits separately from News Corporation.
With the 100 millionth account being created on August
9, 2006 ,in The Netherlands 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.
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 fame is also due in part to her
being promoted on MySpace. In response to an interview
question on Triple J, in which she was asked if she
was 'discovered by MySpace', Allen stated, "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 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. Realising 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 organisations
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".
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.
Because 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. Poorly formatted code can
cause accessibility problems for those using software
such as screen readers. Indeed, the MySpace home page,
as of 25th February 2007, fails HTML validation with
275 errors, using the W3C's validator.
Furthermore, MySpace is set up so that anyone can
customise 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
twenty-five 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 often 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[citation needed].
There are a variety of environments in which users can
access MySpace content on their mobile phone. American
mobile phone provider Helio released a series of
mobile phones in early 2006 that can utilise 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 and
MySpace developed a mobile version of MySpace for a
wider range of carriers, including Cingular. MySpace
Mobile will be appearing on Vodafone in Britain during
the first half of 2007.
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