[M.I.I] Myspace

Myspace is an example of a social networking site but has special features which make it slightly different to it's competitors, such as Facebook and Bebo. It is based in America, Beverly Hills more precisely, owned by Fox Interactive Media and was founded and launched in 2003. Myspace became extremely popular in the US in 2006 and developed into an international website.

Over the six years it has been altered with new designed layouts and new features to improve its purpose. The feature of being able to select an emotion - a cartoon face or object which covers your certain mood was added in July 2007. The picture below shows this:

When you create your profile you can write about yourself in the boxes provided, including, "About you", "Interests", "Who I'd Like to Meet" and so on. It is similar to a blog which you can update but it's like a journal blog. The user can also add a profile picture which can be a realistic picture of oneself or any other picture. Extra security is used for when you want to edit your profile, by having a character (letter and/or number) typing question.

Another feature is MyspaceIM (instant messenger) where users chat online to their friends - similarly to Facebook's IM feature. They both alert users when they receieve new mail, comments and so on too which is useful.

Myspace also has seperate services for their Myspace Music and Videos. Myspace Music is a whole service dedicated to music artists and bands whether they are signed or unsigned. Users can search for an artist or band, for their profile pages, so it is a method for the artist/band to distribute and market their music. Many artists and bands have been discovered through producing and then distributing music across Myspace: Lily Allen, Kate Nash, and The Arctic Monkeys. It is easy to discover new music when it is this accessible and available to anyone. Focusing on the Pop genre, you can see how many artists and bands are in that particular genre, who have profiles on Myspace as it keeps a record of the amount, at the moment it is 723,426.

The Video service is very alike YouTube with different channels, for example, T5M which appears to be focusing on Fashion and design whilst The Hook Up seems to have clips of interviews and the makings of music videos. By signing up to Myspace Video , you can keep a record of your favourite videos because it's easier than searching again. There is a Top Video chart which calculates the amount of users who view particular videos. A user can embed, copy the URL, comment and subscribe to the channel or creator.

If you are signed up to Myspace, you can find your friends, invite and find new ones through the chat forums and searches. Myspace's forums, like others, has multiple choices of topics which users can choose to participant in or just read other user's opinions.

Myspace is one of the original social networking sites alongside Bebo, but has had competition with Facebook, losing some users (not fully but they concentrate more with others). Personally, I use Facebook the most out of the three mentioned as most of my friends have Facebook accounts. However, when it comes to finding music artists and bands, Myspace is the clear winner for its usefulness.