MySpace

What It's All About

Parents wonder what mySpace is all about. Why is it so popular? Why are so many children drawn to it? Where did it come from.

While some of these questions are too long to answer here, I’ll try to give you some facts.

MySpace.com as we know it today was created in July 2003 by Tom Anderson, the current president and CEO Chris DeWolfe and a small team of programmers. It all started innocently enough as a site where musicians could upload music and others could listen. It was free to use and new members would be allocated a small amount of storage space for their music files. As they referred new members, more storage space would be allocated thus it became beneficial to spread the word about the site. This is called viral marketing which means that there is no formal marketing effort. It passes by word of mouth to one person, then they tell a couple people, and they tell a couple of people, and so on, and so on. Reminds me of that shampoo commercial a number of years ago. I know that I am dating myself, but I digress.

So many children are drawn to it because….    everyone they know is already there! Talk about successful viral marketing! If you want to hook up with your friends, share pictures and see what they are doing, you had to be on the same space, so to speak. It was free (all you need is an email address to sign up and they can be obtained for free from MSN, Yahoo, Google and other sites. It was easy to use and you could customize it to a very high degree. This encouraged users to express themselves and make their space as unique as they were.

Anyone can upload picture and video files, then anyone else with an account on mySpace can go to your profile (your home page), click on pics or videos and see what you have uploaded. You can also search or browse for specific titles of things. There is a lot of diversity of content out there. It’s fun sometimes just to browse around to see what people have posted.

It fun, it’s free and best of all it’s hidden from your parents. Kids can be on mySpace and their parents don’t even know. As a matter of fact, most parents have a very distorted perspective of mySpace. Some think it’s a chat room. Some think is email. Others think it’s more like a bulletin board. Actually it’s a little of all of these plus much, much more.

Not all the users are kids. At one point you had to be 17 just to sign up and get an account. Of course you had to self-report your age, so it was amazing how many people were 17 and older. And that’s one of the dangers. You can be anyone you want on mySpace. Nodody knows unless you tell them. And people do pose as someone else. In fact, many people have multiple mySpace accounts and take on different personalities when using different accounts.

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