MYSPACE.CA is NOT the
Canadian site of MYSPACE.COM! (ca.myspace.com)
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 MySpace
is a social networking website offering an
interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs,
groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally.
Its headquarters
are in Beverly Hills, California, USA, where it shares an office building
with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media; which is owned by News
Corporation, which has its headquarters in New York City.
According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is
currently the world's sixth most popular website, and the third most popular
website in the United States, though it has topped the chart on various
weeks. The service gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to
achieve nearly 80% of visits to online social networking websites in 2006.
Today its traffic is similar to that of Facebook,
a competing social network.
The company employs 300 staff and does not disclose revenues or profits
separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on
August 9, 2006 in the Netherlands and a news story claimed 106 million
accounts on September 8, 2006, and the site reportedly attracts 230,000 new
registrations per day. As of February 3, 2008, there are over 300 million
accounts.
Dave Itzkoff, in the June 2006 Playboy magazine, related his experiences of
experimentation with membership in MySpace. Among his other criticisms, one
pertains to the distance afforded by the Internet that emboldens members,
such as females who feature photos of themselves in scant clothing on their
profile pages or behave in ways they would not in person, and he indicated
that this duplicity undercuts the central design of MySpace, namely, to
bring people together. Itzkoff also referenced the addictive, time-consuming
nature of the site, mentioning that the Playboy Playmate and MySpace member
Julie McCullough, who was the first to respond to his add-friend request,
pointedly referred to the site as "cybercrack". Itzkoff argued 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.
Furthermore, in terms of MySpace's potential for underhanded commercial
exploitation, 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) was found
to be a solicitation for a series of commercial porn sites. Itzkoff is
similarly critical of the more subtle commercial solicitations on the site,
such as the banner ads and links to profiles and video clips that turn out
to be, for example, commercials for new 20th Century Fox films. He also
observed that MySpace’s much-celebrated music section is heavily weighted in
favor of record labels rather than breakthrough musicians.
In relating criticism
from another person, whom Itzkoff called "Judas," he illustrated that, while
the goal of attempting to bring together people who might not otherwise
associate with one another in real life may seem honorable, MySpace
inherently violates a social contract only present when people interact
face-to-face, rendering, in his opinion, the website 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, adding, and gawking at the
same alarming photos as an army of 14-year olds, and quick as deer, they’ll
dash to the next trend. And before you know it, we’ll all follow.
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 it's
owners most of whom were in their late teens and early twenties.
MYSPACE.CA is NOT the
Canadian site of MYSPACE.COM! (ca.myspace.com)
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