MySpace is a free social networking internet service which enables its registered members to communicate through blogs, an internal e-mail system, web forums and more. Members can also upload and display photos and other information on their profile.

History

MySpace was founded in 2003 as a web portal for musicians. Artists were provided a means of sharing music as well as information on future concert locations. The website's userbase has since grown beyond musicians and as of late-2005 there are over 42 million MySpace users.

Many mainstream music groups also have promotional pages on the site and celebrities such as Jason Mraz, Dane Cook, Spiraling, Kelly Osbourne, Shane McMahon, Fall Out Boy, and Tommy Lee have said in interviews that they have or had profiles in the site.

Prior to the current site, the MySpace.com domain was a virtual drive service that shut down years ago when the dot-com bubble burst. The current MySpace service was founded in July 2003 by Tom Anderson, the current President, Chris DeWolfe, the current CEO, and a small team of programmers. It was partially owned by Intermix Media, which was bought in July 2005 for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (the parent company of Fox Broadcasting and other media enterprises).

The site is reportedly written in ColdFusion and ASP.NET and run on Microsoft Windows servers.

MySpace, a free social networking internet service, allows anyone with a valid email to create a MySpace page.

Problems

• Many people enjoy the freedom in MySpace to express themselves by customising their profiles. However, this freedom permits malformed HTML, CSS, videos, or Flash animations in profiles. This can sometimes render unreadable text or loud music, and may strain system resources or even crash the web browser. While most malicious code is filtered out, some users have still found ways to insert disruptive HTML.

• In July 2005 Kuro5hin reported a cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability on MySpace [1]. In October 2005, a user, "Samy" exploited this vulnerability creating a worm which added millions of people to his buddy list, and forced MySpace to go offline for maintenance [2].

• Chain letters and messages that claim that MySpace will charge money or shut down if they don't pass the message around, circulate the user bulletin boards. MySpace solves this by saying "You dont need to pass any silly bulletins around to 'save' your account. We don't delete accounts for being inactive. You will never have to post a bulletin to save your account, that's nonsense. If you got deleted, it's because you're underage or broke the rules.". Users are also spammed with other sorts of chain letters that can sometimes be hateful to different groups of people or even threatening. Usually, this is only a problem for newcomers to MySpace, who have never seen any message of the sort before. Regular users on the other hand, usually recognize them for what they are and skip and or delete the messages, while others report those who post them.

• Many people use the picture feature on MySpace to display nudity although it is against the rules. This is a problem because the oldest you have to be in order to set up a MySpace profile is 14, and any viewers under the age of 18 who don't have a MySpace profile can still see a user's main picture.

• Some users experience chronic login problems.

• The site has many coding errors that have not been fixed, despite being pointed out many times (such as off-by-one errors in the number of discussion pages or replies in groups)

• Users commonly experience error messages such as the ubiquitous "Sorry! an unexpected error has occurred. This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group."

• MySpace is sometimes slow or/and unresponsive.

• As with other websites of the like, Myspace profiles contain people of questionable nature who propagate drug usage and confess to being habitual users. Some members even try selling drugs on Myspace. The users simply post bulletins that are sent out to multiple users at one time about what they have available for sale and how they can be reached.

Suicide Controversy

On the morning of November 29, 2005, 17 year old Josh Ballard used MySpace's "Bulletin" feature to post a suicide note instructing his friends to call the police and apologizing for his actions.[3] About 15 minutes later, according to the Orange County coroner's office, Ballard died from a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head.[4]

News of the suicide spread rapidly. By 10 p.m. the night of his death, Ballard was being praised by various friends on his MySpace page. Others, however, began mocking the "suicide kid," probably because of his “emo” image. Some users at the famous YTMND website created various videos mocking his suicide note and the design of his MySpace. Because this is one of the few times a suicide note was posted to an internet site by someone who then actually killed themselves, the incident attracted a great deal of attention in the internet community, but surprisingly little in the mainstream media.

Ballard's funeral service was on December 6 of the same year. His MySpace page is still up, however, it is almost completely empty with the exception of his friend's accounts, his information and a couple of pictures of himself.

MySpace Records

MySpace sponsored the Vans Warped Tour 2005, where they had a tent. They set up signings and meet & greets from bands on the tour.

Recently Tom Anderson has begun a side project called MySpace Records, a music label signing artists who have been successful through MySpace. Hollywood Undead was the first of many bands to be signed. MySpace Records released its first compilation CD on November 15, 2005.

The CD has been promoted by MySpace with the promise of giving buyers four more profile pictures (bringing their picture limit to sixteen) if they send in a card which is included in the CD. Also, people who preordered their CD will get eight additional profile pictures.

The CD itself features pictures of other MySpace members.

See also

• Tom Anderson — founder
• List of social networking sites

External links

• MySpace
• The user-friendly Web site teens can't resist: An article explaining the Myspace phenomenon
• Josh Ballard MySpace suicide news storyfr:MySpace