MySpace is the most popular social networking website - it still has more traffic than Friendster and similar sites. MySpace was founded in 2003 by Tom Anderson. Originally MySpace was intended as a communication platform for new and popular music groups and their fans but it quickly turned into a general purpose social network with more than 100 million users. The company was bought by News Corporation in 2005 for 580 million US dollars.
But why is MySpace successful? The first expression of the myspace.com website is not really impressing - but this is the case with most of the top internet companies. Is Google's start page impressing? The MySpace user profiles all look different so it's hard to see any structure. This might be the success factor - people can express themselves by designing their profiles.
Users may select some predefined content blocks like blogs, comments and a friend space and insert multimedia objects like music or videos which might be hosted on video sites like YouTube. You can even use HTML for certain parts of the profile and override CSS styles for changing the general appearance of a profile. There's one drawback: the CSS tags entered by users appear in the middle of the profile page so it starts loading ith the default style and turns into the custom style while rendering the page. This results into some strange looking effects while the profile page loads. MySpace profile pages are not structured well and they always fail the W3C tests for valid HTML documents.
There are many MySpace profile editors and layout schemes available for free offered by independent companies, but these don't work any more because MySpace launched it's own editor and disabled all external editor. Though, MySpace Layouts have turned into a big market and all these companies are dependet on the MySpace terms. Most of the video hosting sites like YouTube get most of their traffic from MySpace profiles and MySpace can decide if they accept the content of specific sites in thier profiles or not. Blocking certain hosting servers results in immediate loss of major traffic as happened to Photobucket just before going public.
After all MySpace is a great place to express yourself and get in contact with new friends and buddies as well as seek for potential partners. In fact it is used as a dating and flirting platform by many of the younger users of MySpace. Many sites have copied the MySpace concept but are not as successful as MySpace. A social networking site only works with many users and it's quite hard to beat the 100 million mark of MySpace.
Article Source :http://infopool.webverve.com/
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