MySpace
MySpace is a popular 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 fifth 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. However it is still the most popular social networking site in the United States.
The company employs 300 staff and does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. The 100 millionth account was created on August 6, 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.
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. 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 current CEO), Josh Berman, Tom Anderson (MySpace’s current 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.(src:wikipedia.org)