Nick I hope you publish the C&D New Corp's Lawyers will be sending later today :P.

Don't be afraid to publish this type of information. It is newsworthy!

Defamation only applies when it's false =P

Where's the part about Tom owning asian porn sites eh?

I love hearing about that

Whoa! This one's got Digg front page written all over it, doesn't it?

Whoa. This one's got Digg front page written all over it, doesn't it?

I've been waiting for this for quite sometime. Thank you for publishing this and sticking to your guns.

If only Friendster, Yahoo 360, MSN Spaces or Orkut how the marketing firepower of eUniverse this MySpace plague would not be infecting our youth. But alas, without the Cupidjunction marketing juggernaut they could never have hoped to compete.

This article is about as naive as they get. Fine to tell a warts-and-all story, but please don't pretend that MySpace is some uniquely evil organization.

"1. MySpace is NOT a viral success."

Well, by that standard, *nothing* is a viral success. So what if eUniverse had a directory of email addresses? There had to be some value in the service, and viral spread, if it was to attract the number of users it has.

"2. The whole site is, in essence, a marketing tool that everyone who registers has access to."

Um, sorry, couldn't this apply to every single blog platform, to all of web publishing, in fact?

"3. Tom Anderson did NOT create MySpace."

Shock. Horror. One colorful person gets a disproportionate share of attention in the telling of a startup's history. Like that's never happened before.

"4. MySpace's CEO Chris DeWolfe is connected to a past of spam."

Well, spamming is one of the few real taboos on the web. So I'll concede this point, if the facts are established.

"5. MySpace was a direct assault on Friendster.com."

Oh, this takes the biscuit. One startup copied another, mimicking its strongest features, and avoiding its mistakes. Hmmm, a little like Valleywag is a take on Gawker, which is a take on Spy, which was a take on Private Eye. Please, enough of the manufactured outrage.

@Nick Denton:

"Nothing is a viral success"? I suppose if you take a very very narrow view, this is probably true. Most companies do advertise, even if it's just using Adwords.

But I think most people consider "viral success" to be where a majority of your customers are driven to you without advertising (including emails and spam, like MySpace did).

Google, at least in the early days, clearly falls into this category. So did eBay early on.

I can tell you that my company, SmugMug, derives somewhere between 60% and 80% of it's subscriptions through only word-of-mouth, and we've done zero advertising other than Adwords.

There are viral successes out there, to be sure. It's a rare things, but they're there. And MySpace certianly doesn't qualify and certainly is getting tons of press on how viral they were.

I tend to agree with you on all of the other points, though. :)

Nick, I am looking forward for this series. Yes, I think that MySpace is SPAMWORLD2.0 ,totally legit bu tnevertheless spam.. !! :)_

@One Thumb

I think you missed Denton's point - if MySpace is not a viral success, what is? Fine, so MySpace had eUniverse's email list. But, just those lists were not enough to make it a success. People began to join because there must have been value, and sent to their friends. There's a reason MySpace is around, and Friendster lacks friends. Ha, pun.

But, thus far, nothing is really surprising, especially if you were around during the boom and bust.

MySpace built a good product. They have an interesting enough product that keeps people interested. There will be challengers that carve out their own pieces of the pie, but that's the Internet.

hell yeah Nick. 100% support on this one. effing myspace, i don't even know what it really means. i mean, who is tom anyway?

Right on, Denton. The article is basically saying that Myspace is a business that wants to make money created by people with a good PR strategy.

There is a story to tell here, but it has more to do with spam, content censoring, and deceptive business practices.

The reason MySpace is such a huge success ultimately comes down to one thing: Friendster's servers couldn't scale.

Back when the whole online networking thing really took off, Friendster was at the top of the heap, but the service grinded to a screeching halt under the sudden exponential traffic growth.

Enter MySpace, which essentially did what Friendster did, but actually worked when everyone tried to join! And so the exodus began, everyone messaged their Friendster buddies and said, "I'm going to MySpace, follow me!"

I don't disagree with any of the facts presented in this article, but as far as why it's so popular, Friendster's failure to scale is 90% of MySpace's success.

All good points above...
Myspace continues to be a popularity contest that is actually helping certain social networks and individuals succeed in an environment/marketplace previously unavailable to them. Sure it's spam and lame to us, but it seems that certain demographics, including promoters, DJs, go go dancers, models, etc., are enthusiastic about their new found success, regardless of the origins of the host company. At the end of the day, it's facilitating commerce, communication, dating, and even stalking, and it's not slowing down. I look forward to reading the rest of the story. And about Tom, well he was never my friend anyway.

So this is a scoop? Oh yeah, a steaming scoop of third rate journalese dog poop.

Ha! And I noticed in Vanity Fair this month they repositioned MY revelation of Steve Jobs' shoe size as a Valleywag exclusive. Infamy, infamy.....they've all got it in fer me.

Hawsome.

i'm with denton on this one - the story lacks real meat and insight beyond exposing some smarmy figures behind the original funding and launch, suggesting a 'me-too' strategy and all of that...if you can prove that there was murder, rape, real crime, something like that - well then you've got a story...until then, you might as well also tell me all about how, for example, that killer apple os is really built on bsd's back, or how elgoog grows through - gasp - careful acquisitions, and not brilliant innovation as many would believe...also, why aren't you writing about how lynne cheney's book is over 700 bucks on ebay? shit, now that's some fucking news 'mon!

Myspace is like Friendster? No way!

Based on what you present here, I'll certainly buy in to the idea that MySpace is basically Spam 2.0. But what's interesting is not that "a crime has been committed" (it hasn't), but that the people from the spam-world finally figured out how to get the public to opt in (through something other than porn).

This is awesomeness... I can't wait for the full read... I give you the most respect for giving up this info. \,,/

Zzzzzzzzzzz. Huh? What!? zzzzzzzzzzzz. Hope you cash that check before valleywag realizes what a who cares piece of news this is.

Nice work.

Nick,

Awesome article, kudos to you and Trent. Great piece and from what I've heard on the street this is very much fact.

Sad isn't it...whats gonna be Spam 3.0? Any guesses?

wow, if this is really "journalism" - i guess everyone's born a journalist. nice masterful summary of the obvious here, Trent. let's see if i got this right: 1- myspace is really trying to make money off it's user base by serving, gasp, online ads! excuse me while i regain my breath. 2 - tom is really not the founder of myspace?!? the same people who are surprised by that are probably the same people who have yet to find out that santa clause is in fact just mom and dad staying up late on xmas eve. 3 - MySpace is the ripoff because Friendster was a JV operation running on one server in someone's garage?

So what happened to the 'full' edition?

Yawn.
I'm going back to Rupert's playground. You're boring me.

http://myspace.com/namesrtaken
Come see all the neat stuff I have to sell!
XD

Hah, I always knew Tom didn't create MySpace :). The idiot can't even spell!

-Daniel Fischer
http://www.danielfischer.com

I totally agree with Nick - he basically said exactly what I would have said. Trent, I have to say that I'm starting to come round to one of my reader's viewpoints.

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/05/30/mac-rumors-are-boring/#c156...

I totally agree with what Nick said - that's basically exactly my thoughts on this. It's a really niave article. Companies lie on a daily basis and it's ok to reveal the lies, just don't write it up like you're uncovering a government conspiracy.

eUniverse was a complete spamming company, I know for a fact. They purchased co-registrations and would send emails from multiple lists to them.

This is such a good blog. I am going to finish more about NewsCorp and there current company used TO SPAM people. Check it out, Its Called TAFMASTER

I'm not sure why y'all are saying it was presented as "uncovering a government conspiracy" or naive.
from article, "I was hired by an online publisher as a freelance journalist to write an article detailing the history and business model of MySpace.com". So there it is, and that's what the articel is about. What was added to it, was Fox Corp trying to prevent the article, for whatever reason. If that makes it a conspiracy, then someone please get Fox to say why it is one.

Sure, it could very well be Spam 2.0, but, honestly........how many people do you think would care if they figured it out? If every single person on myspace got a message including this article......how many people do you think would straight up cancel their account.

"Tom isn't real?? This is made from a big bad corporation???"

Although it's slightly shady, so is everything else in the world, and people aren't afraid of exposing themselves.

I would like to preface my comments by saying the following: Fuck MySpace, and fuck anyone who actually chooses to trawl through a spam infested site to leave meaningless profile comments on random peoples pages.

Okay, That said:

To be perfectly honest, this does not seem like too much damning evidence. So Tom isn't a codemonkey, why should that matter? SO he didn't program the whole thing in his basement, but he hired two other people to do it for him. Did Bill Gates write MS-DOS? Did Linus Trovalds write anything more than a software kernel? Based on the hyperlink text, I expected him to be some lowely subordinate in the company hired months after it's initial conception. He is actually the President of the company, which doesn't seem like such a lie to me.

To me it just seems as if the headline for this story should read, "Marketers Lied -- But amazingly story is that journalists bought it!"

Nick, I can't recall seeing a single article here that wasn't hilarious or tantilizingly salacious. You put up some great stuff, honestly! But I feel I would be doing you a diservice but not telling you strait up: this was not one of those pieces.

This is a lousy article, which would not get by most decent editors.

Too much guilt by association ("oooo... shady businessmen investing in Internet companies!"), no actual information on the marketing of the psuedo-friend Tom Anderson (which was an interesting angle), and repeated references to the glib concept of "Spam 2.0", which he never explains. (I read it as "advertising" and dismissed Lipinski as a sophomoric ad-hater. His personal site actually has a more-interesting definition, but those thoughts are absent from this article.)

Hopefully someone with more investigative chops and ability to string together facts into a story (and less dependence on one, vocal, disgruntled former exec) will do a better job.

Whaaaa. Cry about it.

Don't like it? Don't use it.

How is it SPAM if you're electively using *their* site, and using *their* bandwidth to view your messages? You can't deal with a couple flashing banner ads?

You don't like it? Who cares.

MySpace offers an incredible networking opportunity to independent artists and musicians... it is not unsolicited advertising - you are only able to communicate with people *as long as they accept your friendship!*

This article sounds like such crybaby snivel.

Friendster took a dump because they were having MAJOR performance issues - the site was dog slow. Many people (myself included) migrated to mySpace because they were tired of waiting for Friendster to load.

All I can say is: REPOST!!! This article hits the nail on the head. The critics are haters. It will get MUCH better than myspace when people grow some balls to create a true democratic user driven site.

Who cares? It took you months to figure out that there is advertisements on myspace? And that when you log in you have to view more advertisements? And the most scandalous part...bands ask you to be their friend so you will listen to their music!!! Thank you captain obvious. That's why and how myspace is free...businesses can't operate without money. This has GOT to be the dumbest shit ever written.

The best part about this is that there is a banner ad at the top of this page. Can you spell i-r-o-n-y????

I use myspace for the music content: I can listen to tracks from most bands in the universe there.
Where is the problem?
Thousands of bands have signed up: that's a bad thing, yeah?
I didn't sign up because I thought "Tom. Yeah. As long as this Tom guy is there everything is cool"
I don't give a fuck who he is.
If you dig music, myspace is the shit.
Your article is like a schoolboy radically discovering that they make a profit at the tuck shop.

BIG DEAL!

the truth is nothing about myspace is special, i can find 20 people right now who could build the same thing, what made it successful is it tapped upon a unified resourse where people could connect on an open network, a idea that was revolutionized by you guessed it, friendster, which actually took the idea from smaller less intricate sites, but Malaclypse is right, because myspace could expand it beat out its competition, but the individual networking boom took a life of its own, it really didnt have to do with the PR work, but rather a persons need to connect on a more personal level and the already firm userbase friendster had in effect migrated because of the lack of expansion, I dont agree with the deceptive business practices, but the business model survived because of a solid userbase, think back, collegeclub, hotornot, etc, these sites were relatively simple, but they tapped a primal human need. The real case here is would be the content censoring, where as the business practice is common among big business which is a overall issue with the net in general.

In reality myspace allowed people to have a identity and platform from which they could build a network of friends in a place that everyone could go to, which has been one of the toughest tasks on the net, but because it gathered enough steam it managed to do what many companies like msn, aim, and yahoo havent been able to do with tons of cash, better programmers, more evil, and just as much PR work on their instant messenger products, which is still split into 3 major brands which are for the most part still incompatible, leaving the idea of a larger open network of friends. Myspace succeeded with half the work. the true succes was because of its true value to the individuals that used it. It also allowed propective artists in all areas not just music to promote themselves in a smaller more direct network, and on their own terms.

Sadly they think their success had to do with them,it was just lucky, and like most people who let it go to their head, and deceptive business moves and content censoring will constribute to its loss of the very people who gave it success, , it will self destruct because people will find something better or build it themselves.

You're so, so dense.

elaborate, calling someone dense and leaving it at that leaves no room for getting a better idea of why.

@ Jeremy

"MySpace built a good product. They have an interesting enough product that keeps people interested."

um, some people dont' think so. i don't think so. MySpace is at best Web 0.8
http://www.vincenthorn.com/2006/09/05/myspace-is-web-point...

but anyway, they've got the user base, hence the "success."