Myspace

Myspace, stylized My and previously MySpace, is a social networking website. Its headquarters are in Beverly Hills, California.

Myspace became the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, a position that it held throughout 2007 until 2008. However by April 2008, according to comScore, Myspace was overtaken internationally by its main competitor, Facebook, based on monthly unique visitors.Since then MySpace has declined steadily in spite of several drastic redesigns. Quantcast estimates MySpace's monthly U.S. unique visitors at 19.7 million as of May 2011. The site ranking of Myspace as of June 2011 was 80,as opposed to the number 2 position held by Facebook.

At its peak Myspace employed 1,600 employees, which was reduced to 1,000 after laying off 30% of its workforce in June 2009. By June 2011, further job cuts reduced its size to 400 employees, with Myspace to lay off at least 150 employees and put another 150 employees on a transition plan in which they can still work for pay temporarily while looking for another job.

As a subsidiary from July 2005 to June 2011, Myspace does not disclose revenues or profits separately from its parent News Corporation. On June 29, 2011, Myspace was sold to Specific Media for US$35 million. Pop star Justin Timberlake also took a small stake in the deal.

New image

On October 27, 2010, Myspace introduced a beta version of a new site design on a limited scale, with plans to switch all interested users to the new site in late November. Chief executive Mike Jones said the site is no longer competing with Facebook as a general social networking site. Instead, Myspace would be music-oriented and would target younger people. Jones believed most younger users would continue to use the site after the redesign, though older users might not. The goal of the redesign is to increase the number of Myspace users and how long they spend there. On October 26, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield said, "Most investors have written off MySpace now," and he was unsure whether the changes would help the company recover. However, these new changes are highly disliked by the Myspace community.

New logo design

A report in October 2010 at Techcrunch.com detailed Myspace's debut of a new logo. The "My" portion appears in a different font, while the part previously occupied by the word "Space" was replaced by a simple underline mark, representing a blank "space". This logo has been implanted on Myspace's website since November 11.

Revenue model

Myspace operates solely on revenues generated by advertising as its user model possesses no paid-for features for the end user. Through its Web site and affiliated ad networks, Myspace is second only to Yahoo! in its capacity to collect data 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 advertising on Myspace. Myspace has proven to be a windfall for many 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 advertisements that would generate revenue for the companies.

In 2009, Myspace also added a new status update feature. If a Myspace user has a Twitter account, the tweet will also update the Myspace status. (Facebook also has a similar feature.) It does, however, require that the two accounts be synched up together.

Criticism

Accessibility and reliability

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. The Myspace home page, as of May 20, 2009, fails HTML validation with around 101 errors (the number changes on sequential validations of the home page due to dynamic content), using the W3C's validator.

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 are not 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 sound files are automatically played at the same time when a profile loads). While Myspace blocks potentially harmful code (such as JavaScript) from profiles, users have occasionally found ways to insert such code. PC World cited this as its main reason for naming Myspace as #1 in its list of twenty-five worst web sites ever.

Security

In October 2005, a flaw in MySpace's site design was exploited by "Samy" to create the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. MSNBC has reported that "social-networking sites like Myspace are turning out to be hotbeds for spyware," and "infection rates are on the rise, in part thanks to the surging popularity of social-networking sites like MySpace.com. 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, thus keeping the myspace.com domain as the address. More recently, there has been spam on bulletins that has been the result of phishing. Users find their Myspace homepage with bulletins they did not post, realizing later they had been phished. The bulletin consists of an advertisement that provides a link to 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 a 'phished' 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 also become 'phished', and their account would be used to spam other members, thus spreading this security problem.

Myspace's anti-phishing and anti-spam measures have also come under fire. In 2007 Myspace made changes such that external links on profiles would be redirected through the http://msplinks.com domain. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org would be changed to http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vZW4ud2lraXBlZGlhLm9yZw==http (The new links are determined by Base64 encoding, as there are ways of decoding the link back into its original URL.) Myspace staffers would be able to disable potentially dangerous links. (The changed links only work if the HTTP referrer is a Myspace page; otherwise, the link will appear to be disabled.) This move has been criticized that it makes profile editing inconvenient and that it does nothing to deter spammers. In February 2008 Myspace changed the system such that users who click such links (except for whitelisted domains like Wikipedia and YouTube) will receive a warning that they will be leaving the myspace.com domain. As of March 2008, this "feature" has been extended to blogs as well, although previous blog entries are unaffected unless the user updates them.

History

After 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 website, in August 2003. Within 10 days, the first version of Myspace was ready for launch, implemented using ColdFusion. 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 was not distracted with typical start-up issues. The project was overseen by Brad Greenspan (eUniverse's Founder, Chairman, CEO), who managed Chris DeWolfe (MySpace's starting CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace's starting president), and a team of programmers and resources provided by eUniverse.

The very 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 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.

Original logo

The origin of the MySpace.com domain was a site owned by YourZ.com, Inc. It was intended to be a leading online data 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 friend, who reminded him he 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 data storage business, which itself was a casualty of the "dot bomb" era.

Shortly 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 large and successful community.

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.