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MySpace: A site with 26 million 'friends'
By Alex Williams The New York Times
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2005
"I conduct my entire business through MySpace," said Wilson, 25, who relies on MySpace.com, a social networking Web site, to orchestrate his professional and personal schedule and is no longer sure he needs an America Online account or even a telephone.
Created in 2003 as a looser, music-driven version of www.friendster.com, MySpace quickly caught on with millions of teenagers and young adults as a place to maintain their home pages, which they often decorate with garish artwork, intimate snapshots and blogs filled with frank and often ribald commentary on their lives, all linked to the home pages of friends.
Even with many users in their 20s, MySpace has the personality of an online version of a teenager's bedroom, a place where the walls are papered with posters and photographs, the music is loud, and grown-ups are an alien species.
MySpace has about 27 million members, a nearly 400 percent increase since the start of this year. It passed Google in April in hits, the number of pages viewed monthly, according to comScore MediaMetrix, a company that tracks Web traffic. That may be partly because MySpace members often cycle through dozens of pages each time they log on, checking on friends' pages.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, users spend an average of 1 hour 43 minutes on the site each month, compared with 34 minutes for facebook.com and 25 minutes for Friendster.
"They've just come out of nowhere, and they're huge," David Card, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research, said of MySpace. "They've done a number of things that were really smart. One was blogging. People have been doing personal home pages for as long as the Internet's been around, but they were one of the first social networks to jump on that. They've also jumped on music, and there's a lot of traffic surrounding that.
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