History of Computers - Myspace
Introduction
Myspace was a social networking site created in 2003. It was founded by Chris DeWolfe, Brad Greenspan, Tom Anderson and Josh Berman, four employees of eUniverse, an internet marketing company. The first to sign up for Myspace were the other employees of eUniverse. The company held contests to determine who could sign up the most users. In January of 2004, the site had its official launch and amassed more than 1 million users within a month. In November 2004, 11 months after its launch, Myspace had amassed 5 million unique users. News Corp bought Intermix Media, the company that owned Myspace, for $580 million. The worth of Myspace in the deal was estimated to be around $327 million. Myspace enjoyed a few years of incredible success. In July 2006, Myspace became the most visited site in the United States and 80% of all social network traffic came from Myspace. However, other social media sites like facebook began to appear and threatened Myspace’s popularity. Facebook matched the 115 million unique users of Myspace by April 2008. Myspace entered a $900 million three-year deal with Google that ended up being one of the main factors that lead to its decline. Because of the deal, Myspace was obligated to double the ads on their pages. This made it difficult to add new features and caused the site to have much slower loading times. It’s use and value steadily declined. On June 29, 2011, Specific Media bought MySpace for $35 million, 6% of what Murdoch paid for it six prior. [2]
Overview
Myspace was a popular social networking site. It was originally created to be a place for aspiring bands and musicians to share music and concert details. Myspace grew into a popular site where users could create profiles, including photographs, blogs, music or movie preferences. Additional features included chat rooms, forums, classified ads, newsgroups and a place for sharing videos or music. Each user could invite friends to create profiles or link to already existing ones. This created a network that exponentially expanded as new users with similar interests, tastes, and shared friends were discovered and added. [4]
Significance
Myspace is a famous site for being the first big social media site. It started the movement of popularizing social media platforms. It was a huge turning point in the way people use technology. It’s also a really interesting example of a site that was, at one point, number one and then faded.
