The MySpace layoffs were rumored for weeks beforehand; the top management was reshuffled in April when News Corp., MySpace's parent company, replaced founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe with former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta, and the Web was rife with murmurs of an imminent retooling of the rest of the office.

Just one year ago MySpace was dominating Facebook in the U.S., pulling in 73.7 million users per month in May 2008 to Facebook's 36 million. While Facebook had surpassed MySpace in global unique visitors the previous month, MySpace's vast advantage in the U.S. still gave the site clout with advertisers.

• Facebook.com/WhiteHouse
• MySpace.com/WhiteHouse
• Twitter.com/WhiteHouse

"I don't have a Twitter, a MySpace or a Facebook or anything like that," says the star of the new comedy 17 Again. "I kind of value in people not knowing where I am or what I'm doing."

To demonstrate his take on the typical posting, he says with a laugh: "I'm on the toilet. Still on the toilet. Guys, dot-dot-dot, out of TP. Still on the toilet."

The move brings the website into line with rival Facebook, which has seen strong growth since it opened up to outside programmers.

Facebook has become a portal for services such as video, audio and photos since the change.

MySpace has more than 188 million registered users, compared to the 47 million who use Facebook.

MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m in 2005.

"We hoped it would do very well, but we never imagined it would do this well," Mr Murdoch told the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

The social networking website MySpace has reported a four-fold increase in the number of convicted sex offenders using its service.

The company found more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States had profiles on MySpace - up from a figure of 7,000 given in May.

MySpace said it was pleased it had identified and removed the profiles of the offenders.

Critics of MySpace call for new laws to make such sites safer for children.

The expected change in approach is a reaction to the success of rival Facebook, which last month unveiled a similar step to open its network to outside developers. Although it has less than half as many users as MySpace in the US, Facebook's approach has won it strong backing from other consumer internet companies, which hope it will give them an easier way to reach the network's 27m members.

More than 1,000 applications and services are already available, letting users do things like publish slideshows of personal pictures to their Facebook pages, or add a box that keeps track of when their favourite bands are playing concerts nearby.

"The [Facebook] platform is interesting," Mr DeWolfe said in an interview with the Financial Times. He argued MySpace's current technology approach gave its users many of the same benefits but said: "We'll probably offer users the choice of both."

The aim was to attract more online companies to create services for MySpace's users. "We'll be bringing in more developers."

Fans of MySpace and Facebook are divided by much more than which music they like, suggests a study.

A six-month research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to the social network sites.

The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.

By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "clean" look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is "so lame." What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as "glitzy" or "bling" or "fly" (or what my generation would call "phat") by subaltern teens. Terms like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I'm sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the "eye of the beholder" - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That "clean" or "modern" look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I'm drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

MySpace will acquire Flektor, a just-launched service that allows users to create widgets from photos, video and text, according to two sources with knowledge of the deal. This comes right after the news of MySpace’s pending acquisition of Photobucket last week for $250-$300 million. This will be a much smaller deal, in the $10-$20 million range, possibly with an earnout.

Flektor competes with more established startups like Slide and RockYou, and launched only a few weeks ago. Still, insiders say that the company has developed a killer set of tools to create slide shows as well as much more elaborate widgets that include audio, video, photos, text, effects and transitions. In our testing v. Slide and RockYou, Flektor came out way ahead in usability and features.

It's an odd acquisition, though, since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

Aww, ain't that sweet - Photobucket and MySpace have gotten together and sorted out their problems. Video embeds are working once more on MySpace pages, and I'm sure Photobucket will be much more careful in future when it comes to rolling out sponsored content. In fact, they've put out what amounts to an apology to MySpace - very strange for a company that was hell-bent on dragging them over the coals:

Moving forward, we've established open lines of communication and procedures with MySpace to prevent a sudden block of Photobucket content in future. We want our users to be able to share their content and understand it must be within the framework of MySpace's Terms of Service for it to appear on the site.

This action by MySpace means that all of the videos and remixes you created will no longer show up on your MySpace profile and comments section. More specifically, if you attempt to add new videos or remixes to your profile, they will be removed.

We are not happy about this and we're pretty sure you're not happy either. We appreciate that you have invested hundreds of thousands of hours using the editing, remixing and management tools and features available only on Photobucket. In particular, you've all been really embracing videos at Photobucket -- to the tune of 50,000 video uploads a day, which is great. Rest assured that your content is being kept safe in your Photubucket album even though it may disappear from your MySpace pages.

We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media. MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.

Students at a suburban Catholic school are being ordered to take down their photos, snappy comments, or anything else they may have posted on MySpace.com.

Friday is the deadline for students at St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic School to follow orders or risk suspension. School Principal Sister Margaret Van Velzen sent letters home to parents this week saying, in part, that if families allow children to continue their MySpace.com sites, they will not be allowed to return to school. The school plans to use its computer-savvy staff members to monitor the site for student activity.The principal declined comment, but St. Hugo office manager Judy Martinek said the principal just wants to keep the students safe.

"We've stated our position and we hope all students are in the process of taking down their sites by tomorrow," said Martinek.

In November, MySpace, for the first time, surpassed even Yahoo in the number of Web pages visited by U.S. Internet users, according to comScore Media Metrix, which recorded 38.7 billion page views for MySpace as opposed to 38.05 billion for Yahoo.

The bad news is that MySpace reached this point so fast, just three years after its official launch in November 2003, that it has been forced to address problems of extreme scalability that only a few other organizations have had to tackle.

The result has been periodic overloads on MySpace's Web servers and database, with MySpace users frequently seeing a Web page headlined "Unexpected Error" and other pages that apologize for various functions of the Web site being offline for maintenance. And that's why Drew and other MySpace members who can't send or view messages, update their profiles or perform other routine tasks pepper MySpace forums with complaints.

These days, MySpace seems to be perpetually overloaded, according to Shawn White, director of outside operations for the Keynote Systems performance monitoring service. "It's not uncommon, on any particular day, to see 20% errors logging into the MySpace site, and we've seen it as high as 30% or even 40% from some locations," he says. "Compare that to what you would expect from Yahoo or Salesforce.com, or other sites that are used for commercial purposes, and it would be unacceptable." On an average day, he sees something more like a 1% error rate from other major Web sites.

Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They're going to a new site, they want to start over.

While this feeling of ephemerality is not universal amongst teens, it's far more prevalent than you'd ever see in adult culture and it has some significant implications for design:

Focusing on "lock-in" will fail with these teens - they don't care if they lose track of something they put hours into building.

Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm.

Paying for an account can help truly engaged teens remember their accounts (i haven't found any teen who permanently lost their MMO login) but it can also be a strong deterrent for those accustomed to starting over.

The numbers that people cite concerning accounts created are astoundingly inaccurate and are worthless for talking about usage or unique participants. (added tx to a comment by Rich)

I should note that i don't think that the answer is "help teens remember passwords." I actually think that this tendency to shed is advantageous in the way that we shed clothes every year because the "old me" is no longer relevant. Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting.

Because subscribers use Photobucket primarily as a means to publish content elsewhere, Welch has a unique window into how traffic is moving around the Web. With a peek into the logs, he weighs in on the "death of myspace debate" rather definitively: Myspace "traffic is going up and to the right. It hasn't flattened at all." But at the same time, he's seeing fractionalization. Specialty networks like the goth site VampireFreaks.com are booming. And as Photobucket moves into the mainstream, its demographics are moving beyond the glitter set. Welch says users are starting to tend toward the 35/40 age range. "A lot of them have kids. Scrapbooking is huge. Two Peas in a Bucket is seeing a lot of traffic."

Two enterprising and ambitious journalists with the Fife Herald - Adam Morris and Paul Breslin - have launched a MySpace page linked to their paper (circ. 13,590), which is based in the town of Cupar. In just a couple of weeks the site has recruited 400 friends and it is being used, says Morris, "as a tool to get younger folk to give us story tip offs." Two examples: a local lad took a Ł100 car to Italy and back; revelations of raves in "a secret bunker".

As Morris rightly notes: "It's a totally untapped market for local papers, and it opens up new lines of communication."

For $.99 cents a month FakeYourSpace lets you buy "hotties" both male and female to add to your MySpace profile as friends and what's more they even post 2 comments a week. Oh and fear not, those comments will be germaine because you'll be the on writing them.

FakeYourSpace claims to make it "easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend." Which is really all we want right - the illusion of friends?

FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall. FakeYourSpace makes it easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend. It doesn't stop there however. Maybe you want to appear as if you have a Model for a lover. FakeYourSpace can make this happen! The possibilities are endless. You can have our Models leave you any type of customized message you may wish. Want to make an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend jealous? No problem.

Visitors to social network heavyweight MySpace dropped to 47.2 million in September from 49.2 million in August, a 4 percent decline, per Nielsen//NetRatings. The decrease was more striking at YouTube, which Google just agreed to acquire for $1.65 billion [Adweek Online, Oct. 9]. Compared to August, traffic in September fell 19 percent to 27.6 million.

Corinna Chang, a Nielsen//NetRatings data analyst, said the traffic dips could be attributed to the start of the school year, when "activities like blogging and video searching would experience a decrease as students are focusing on schoolwork and not leisure activities." She noted that overall Web traffic slipped in September.

Social networks have enjoyed a tremendous run in 2006. Since the start of the year, MySpace traffic has grown 65 percent and YouTube's has increased eightfold. The hefty price paid by Google for YouTube was attributed to the buyer's confidence that it could effectively integrate advertising into the site's existing user-friendly features.

While Nielsen//NetRatings detected a decline in the unique visitors to these sites, it reports they continue to keep visitors for long periods. Average time spent by MySpace visitors in September was just over two hours, a slight increase from August. On YouTube, visitors stayed 33 minutes, up from 26 minutes the previous month.

For some, it would be unthinkable – certain social suicide. But Gabe Henderson is finding freedom in a recent decision: He canceled his MySpace account.

No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he had accumulated were really just acquaintances.

He's also phasing out his profile on Facebook, a popular social networking site that, like others, allows users to create profiles, swap message and share photos - all with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.

"The superficial emptiness clouded the excitement I had once felt," Mr. Henderson wrote in a column in the student newspaper at Iowa State University, where he studies history. "It seems we have lost, to some degree, that special depth that true friendship entails."

Though he's not anti-technology, Dr. Bugeja often lectures students about "interpersonal intelligence" - knowing when, where and for what purpose technology is most appropriate.

He points out the students he's seen walking across campus, holding hands with significant others while talking on cellphones to someone else. He's also observed them in coffee shops, surrounded by people, but staring instead at a computer screen.

"True friends," he tells them, "need to learn when to stop blogging and go across campus to help a friend."

Steve Miller, a sophomore at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., joined Facebook as a way to meet people, but also quickly learned that it had limitations, too.

"I discovered, after meeting many of these [online] friends, that a good Facebook profile could make even the most boring person somewhat interesting," says Mr. Miller.

"Text messaging has become the easy way out," Mr. Miller says.

He's had friends cancel a night out with a text message to avoid having to explain. He's also seen some people ask for dates via text to escape the humiliation of hearing a "no" on the phone or in person.

"Our generation needs to get over this fear of confrontation and rejection," he says.

For example, according to comScore, 68 percent of the 55 million MySpace users are 25 and older, while 71 percent of the 1 million users on the declining Friendster fall within the same demographic. Even Facebook, which up until recently was limited to college and high school students, boasts of a growing audience 15 million users - 50 percent of whom are 25-plus. Contrasty, the smaller and less popular Xanga.com is considerably younger, as 20 percent of its 8.1 million user base falls within the 12-17 demographic.

The relative aging of the giant social networks indicates that their recent exponential growth has been driven by new and older Web users discovering the phenomenon. For example, back in August of 2005, teens made up a quarter of the MySpace audience. Now that group represents just 12 percent of users. During the same period, the middle-aged crowd has been gravitating to the site in droves: adults 35-54 now make up more than 40 percent of the site, up 8 percentage points in the last year.

MySpace, the social networking Web site, could be worth around $0 within three years, measured in terms of the value created for shareholders of parent company News Corp., according to a media analyst forecast on Wednesday.

PBS MediaShift analyst Mark Glaser said he had come away from a meeting with various disgruntled teenagers who had given up MySpace accounts, believing that "media investors may not fully appreciate what has already been done with MySpace or what may lie ahead when everyone leaves MySpace for different, more hip social networking sites."

"Worth absolutely zero dollars in a few years? It is possible," Glaser wrote in a research note to himself.

MySpace was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million less than a year ago. It now boasts more than 90 million active users, though it's unclear what they all are actively doing there.

MySpace, which has been criticized for not doing enough to protect its youngest members from sexual predators, said its partnership with Seventeen, the National School Board Association and the National Association of Independent Schools would target parents, teens and teachers with tips, suggestions and information on safe online behavior.

***

The site, which is owned by News Corp., launched in June security measures to protect 14 and 15 year olds. The measures included preventing a person 18 or older from contacting a member under 16 years old, unless he knows either the email address or first and last name of the minor. MySpace at the time also launched more options for privacy settings and restrictions on ad placements to teens.

The additional security followed within days after a 14-year-old girl sued the site in Texas, claiming she was sexually assaulted by a man she met on MySpace.

Earlier this year, MySpace hired Hemanshu Nigam as chief security officer. Nigam is a former federal prosecutor against Internet child exploitation for the U.S. Department of Justice.

Berman said the company was hoping its users would use such tools to encourage friends to register. He acknowledged MySpace was late in launching a voter-registration drive, but said he still hoped "thousands upon thousands of MySpacers will register to vote and spread the word."

Election Day is Nov. 7, and many states close voter registration up to a month before that.

To register, members simply go to http://www.myspace.com/declareyourself and enter a state or ZIP code. After entering the requested information, the site generates a PDF file that can be printed and mailed to state election officials. A Spanish version also is available.

Although MySpace has a heavy youth population, about 80 percent of its 114 million registered members are old enough to vote, according to the Los Angeles-based company.

On Wednesday, Universal Music Group Chairman Doug Morris took a swipe at social networking, arguing that the sites assist users in violating copyrights of music videos.

"We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars," Morris said. "How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly."

Representatives of YouTube declined to comment on Morris' remarks, which were made during a Merrill Lynch Media and Entertainment Conference in Pasadena, Calif.

Some of the most popular postings are copyrighted music videos that include Universal Music artists, such as Mariah Carey and the Black Eyed Peas. Other sites, such as Yahoo and AOL, also offer videos but pay Universal Music each time a video is viewed.

Universal Music insiders said the four major music companies — Universal Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI Group — are in talks with YouTube to adopt screening software that would keep unauthorized videos off the sites.

Graphically, many MySpace pages look like a teenager's bedroom after a tornado--a swirl of clashing backgrounds, boxes stacked inside other boxes, massive photos, and sonic disturbance. Try loading a few of those pages at once and watch what happens to your CPU. Watch out for spyware, too, since it turns out that MySpace has become a popular distribution vector for drive-by downloads and other exploits. And in a place where "U are soooooooo hot!!!" passes for wit, MySpace isn't doing much to elevate the level of social discourse.

In response to a public backlash and some well-publicized lawsuits, MySpace has begun modifying its policies--for example, limiting adults' ability to contact minors. That's hardly enough. Requiring some kind of authentication from MySpacers--or their parents--to validate their ages and identities would go a long way toward scaring off the creeps and making the site a kinder, gentler social network

Is MySpace totally bad? Not at all. Are we old farts? Yeah, probably. But the Web's most popular site needs a serious security reboot. And probably a makeover. Until then, MySpace won't ever be OurSpace.

Hey MySpace kids: Want to read a magazine? If you answered yes, you may be in luck. MySpace is actively considering whether to launch an ink-on-paper magazine to complement its insanely popular and remarkably valued online property. The editorial mix would likely cover standout MySpace members and their interests, from music to their social scenes.

"We're in the process of modeling it," said an executive privy to the discussions. "Our main concern is the MySpace brand. We don't want to do anything that would hurt the brand."

When Josh Schlichting left a message on Gov. Tim Pawlenty's online MySpace profile to say that a new Twins stadium was a bad idea, he thought it might eventually be delivered to the governor himself.

But Pawlenty never got the message because apparently no one in his office had anything to do with creating the profile on the popular social-networking website or, until recently, knew anything about it.

"It's unauthorized," said Mike Krueger, Pawlenty's campaign manager.

Someone -- it's not clear who -- signed up to create Pawlenty's profile a year ago, and no one has logged in to the account since April.

BLY
My mom always uses the excuse about the internet being "public" when she defends herself. It's not like I do anything to be ashamed of, but a girl needs her privacy. I do online journals so I can communicate with my friends. Not so my mother could catch up on the latest gossip of my life.

The truth is many of these sites are becoming lame because everyone is on them. It's not so cool anymore as teachers and parents like my mom are doing their own pages.

MOM (on tape)
Yes I did have a site on MySpace. I had a few pictures of myself...they were very candid shots that I might not normally hang up in my house or show to my friends. And I am an adult, so I put my true first name and my true age, but I didn’t give too much personal information.
BLY: Did you make friends on MySpace?
MOM: Yes I did. And I didn't even do it to make friends, I did it to stay in touch with some friends. And I was a little weirded out the first time someone I didn't know contacted me.

BLY
She might have been creeped out at first, but Mom ended up going to a hockey game with one guy. What a hypocrite! Especially since Mom is always warning me about strangers online. My mom having a Myspace? So embarrassing!

It also speaks to the tipping point that I think is happening with a lot of the social networking sites that have been getting the most media coverage -- now that everyone (parents, teachers, police, etc.) has discovered them, they are losing their allure with teens. Bly, the teen in this conversation, also talks about how her mom now has a MySpace page (and even went on a date with someone she met there), and how it's SO embarrassing.

YouTube has established itself at the top of the league of the new generation of community websites by becoming even more popular than MySpace, according to research.

The video sharing site has taken a 3.9% share of global internet visits a day compared with 3.35% for MySpace, according to internet analysis company Alexa.

YouTube's popularity has grown immensely over the first six months of the year. In May its reach outgrew that of the BBC's websites.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube's American user base grew by 297% in the first half of the year.

The company blamed the closure on record-breaking heat in Los Angeles where its data servers are held.

The high temperatures caused "massive power outages" a spokesman for the company said.

MySpace lets users build a personalised home page and has almost three million visitors each month.

A MySpace spokesperson said: "Due to the record breaking heat in Los Angeles over the weekend the area where MySpace's servers are stored had massive power outages.

"With power resumed, the network is now up and running."

"hey everyone! there's been a power outage in our data center. we're in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. -Tom"

But seriously, it is hard to believe that a service this large could just have one data center. Have they not heard of redundancy? I am pretty sure there is more to the story. One can only imagine how millions of MySpace users feel right now.

It's pretty significant when such a massive site goes down for an extended period of time - can you imagine what would happen if Google, or even Yahoo, went offline for hours at a time? (In fact, I remember the outcry in May 2005 when Google suffered a DNS error, resulting in speculation that it had been hacked). With MySpace, however, it's almost expected: users regularly see errors and the code is notoriously poor. It's not clear whether this current downtime is caused by the power problem, or something else. I know a few people who are hoping it stays this way.

In fact, the News Corp. site has recently experienced declines in its audience aged 12 to 17, 12 to 24 and 12 to 34, while seeing increases in the 21-to-34, 25-to-34, and 35-to-54 demographics, according to data from comScore Networks.

"A lot of people have a faulty perception about the MySpace audience,'' says Phil Carpenter, vice president of marketing of Simply Hired, the job-search engine that powers the newly launched MySpace careers section. "It's a lot more diverse than what people believe it to be.''

The change in audience demographics may be attributable to factors beyond MySpace's control, such as the fact that many college students take final exams in May and should in theory be studying instead of hanging out online. Some leveling off in younger users is also to be expected, given the explosive growth of the site, which launched in January 2004.

Online teen hangout MySpace.com ranked as the No. 1 U.S. Web site last week, displacing Yahoo Inc.'s top-rated e-mail gateway and Google Inc.'s search site, Internet tracking firm Hitwise said on Tuesday.

News Corp.'s MySpace accounted for 4.46 percent of all U.S. Internet visits for the week ending July 8, pushing it past Yahoo Mail for the first time and outpacing the home pages for Yahoo, Google and Microsoft's MSN Hotmail.

MySpace, which dominates social networking on the Web, also gained share in June from other sites that aim to create virtual communities online for sharing music, photos or other interests, Hitwise said.

MySpace captured nearly 80 percent of visits to online social networking sites, up from 76 percent in April. A distant second was FaceBook at 7.6 percent.

Yahoo! rejected the claim as "misleading" because it ranked the search engine's domains such as search, news, and e-mail separately instead of adding them together.

MySpace.com got more online visitors than the Yahoo! or Yahoo! Mail websites last week, according to Hitwise, an online intelligence service based in New York City.

Yahoo! said it wasn't accurate to compare MySpace traffic to that at one of the separate internet doors used to reach the Sunnyvale, California, company's services.

"When taking into account all of Yahoo!'s domains together as an entire network, Yahoo! clearly remains the number one property in terms of audience share, duration share, page view share and days visited per month," the company said in a release.

Under the changes, expected to be announced Wednesday and taking effect next week, MySpace users who are 18 or over could no longer request to be on a 14- or 15-year-old's friends' list unless they already know either the youth's e-mail address or full name.

Any user will still be able to get a partial profile of younger users by searching for other attributes, such as display name. The difference is that currently, adults can then request to be added to a youth's list to view the full profile; that option will disappear for adults registered as 18 and over.

However, users under 18 can still make such contact, and MySpace has no mechanism for verifying that users submit their true age when registering. That means adults can sign up as teens and request to join a 14-year-old's list of friends, which would enable the full profiles.

The partial profiles display gender, age and city. Full profiles describe hobbies, schools and any other personal details a user may provide.

Myspace has asked that we fold up shop. (I only emailed them 4 times asking them what I should do.) The Cease and Desist letter is below. DatingAnyone.com started back in April 2006 as a cool idea and a challenging development project. I have no doubt that it provided a real service to its users and it's unfortunate that there is no avenue for outside improvement of Myspace.

Last night I was browsing the news and I read another story about harm done to a minor facilitated through contact on Myspace. If there is any area that needs to be addressed, it certainly is this one. Myspace has enjoyed exciting growth in the past year, adding millions of new users. Unfortunately adequate safeguards to verify the age and identity of those using Myspace have yet to be implemented. The only aspect of DatingAnyone.com which ever gave me pause were questions as to the accuracy of Myspace profile ages. I hope Myspace chooses to rise to the challenge of keeping their online community safe for all users, rather than passing the buck and hiding behind a buyer beware legal stance.

When I said I was going to a press screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," a friend said, "Al Gore talking about the environment! Bor...ing!" This is not a boring film. The director, Davis Guggenheim, uses words, images and Gore's concise litany of facts to build a film that is fascinating and relentless. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.

In the U.S., it ranks second only to Yahoo Inc. in page views, and drew almost 5 percent of all Web site visits in March, ahead even of mighty Google Inc., which drew little over 4 percent, according to Hitwise Pty. Ltd.

It currently has over 73 million registered users worldwide, and adds about 250,000 new ones every day, according to a MySpace spokesman.

Users set up personal profile pages, where they can post photos, keep a blog journal, link to friends’ profiles and see messages left by others. Teens seem to use their profile pages mostly to post notes to their friends and classmates, commenting on parties they went to or things that happened at school.

It has unexpectedly become the preferred Web starting point, snatching that title from Google in the same way Google took it from Yahoo, says Bill Tancer, Hitwise's general research manager.

"Although it's not a search engine, it's the biggest threat to Google today because it's taking over as the place you go to first on the Internet," Tancer says.

This is right on the heels of the launch of AIM Pages, which is directly targeting Myspace and other social networks.

Look for a launch in the next week.

I am seeing an increasing trend of the big guys simply copying what successful startups are doing. AOL with this product and AIM Spaces. Google with Google Notepad and a flurry of other projects, etc. The only large company that is even experimenting with unproven concepts at this point is Microsoft with its various Live.com ideas. I'd like to see more experimenting at the big company level.

"MySpace is the largest video site on the Web, with more video uploaded every day than any other site on the Internet," Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, said in a statement.

Now MySpace and other social-networking sites like LiveJournal.com and Facebook are facing a new threat: a proposed federal law that would effectively require most schools and libraries to render those Web sites inaccessible to minors, an age group that includes some of the category's most ardent users.

"When children leave the home and go to school or the public library and have access to social-networking sites, we have reason to be concerned," Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, told CNET News.com in an interview. Fitzpatrick and fellow Republicans, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, on Wednesday endorsed new legislation (click here for PDF) that would cordon off access to commercial Web sites that let users create public "Web pages or profiles" and also offer a discussion board, chat room, or e-mail service.

That's a broad category that covers far more than social-networking sites such as Friendster and Google's Orkut.com. It would also sweep in a wide range of interactive Web sites and services, including Blogger.com, AOL and Yahoo's instant-messaging features, and Microsoft's Xbox 360, which permits in-game chat.

But, banning the sites in schools and libraries not only isn't the answer, it actually is likely to make the situation worse. In schools and libraries, at least, adults can monitor the students while helping to educate them about the dangers online, rather than pretending they don't exist. This law doesn't protect the children -- it takes away the responsibility of teaching them how to be safe online.

Hastert said on Wednesday that it "would put filters in schools and libraries so that kids can be protected... We've all heard stories of children on some of these social Web sites meeting up with dangerous predators. This legislation adds another layer of protection."

It's a really simple, clean-looking implementation that feels very solid and exposes the right level of functionality up front.

Tom is the only default contact that you have when you first install the client. There is a prominent "Add your friends to IM" link on the client that takes you to a page that lets you add your MySpace friends to IM with one click.

The client retains your chat history (as you can see in the below chat with Tom), and has a big ol' box that sets your away message.

The only bug I noticed was that my MySpace image doesn't show up, likely because it's a gif. They're working on that, though.

My goal is to rule the fast food world with an iron fist. And raise a happy family. I was born on a cattle ranch in Colorado. I didn't have much except a love for burgers and pretty women. What else does your average red-blooded American need? Then I headed to sunny California. Why? Cuz I had this idea to let people order burgers from their cars...and, well, people in California love their cars. (Not to mention I have a thing for blondes.) So I opened up Jack in the Box. Met my wife Cricket. Got my sweet yellow hat and an even sweeter jet.

Two weeks ago after a long long day at work, I came home and ate 4 tacos, 2 jumbo jacks, onion rings and a diet soda. My all time record.

Here's a bulletin I recently found posted to her site:

"OMG! Add this hott guy! He will whore the first 20 people added to his friends list Add him! You can do it in his van!"

Loosely translated, the teenage girl was "pimping" a teenage boy, shown smooching his guitar, as a potential new friend -- or more -- for my daughter. If Taylor added him to her MySpace "friends" list, the tousled-hair teen would be able to look at her Web site and send messages to her.

The soliciting girl made the pitch to all 245 of her own "friends" with a simple keystroke.

In the MySpace world, this is called a "whore code." It's a mild -- very mild -- example of the coarse language and often profane messages that are plastered all over the social networking site like graffiti on bathroom walls.

This is how she responded: "I'm really mad because it feels like you're saying I can't talk to my friends anymore. On MySpace, I get to talk to my friends and see people I don't see a lot. You get to keep in touch with everyone, and it's fun. You took away my fun!"

What if I allowed Taylor to maintain a page while keeping a close eye on it? I would join it too so I could become familiar with the site's benefits and drawbacks.

So I typed out the contract, and Taylor enthusiastically signed it. She created an account for me and assigned me a URL, www.myspace.com/im(underscore)a(underscore)cool(underscore)mom, that reflected the giddiness of our truce.

Taylor was thrilled by this turn of events: "Yeah! I can't believe you're letting me do it. I guess it's OK that I have to sign this thing. I don't want you supervising me. I think I can do it on my own. But I'm glad you let me have my own page. It's a generous thing for you to do."

Taylor had posted shots of herself and two other girls giving a one-fingered salute. I couldn't believe that she would post the photos knowing that I was looking over her shoulder. What was she thinking?

This is what she was thinking, Taylor said: "I was like, 'Should I do this? I don't know.' But I thought you wouldn't care because I didn't say anything on them. They were just pictures. And (the two other girls) already had them up on their pages."

So only hours after she died in an automobile accident near Valdosta, Ga., early on the morning of Feb. 27, her father, John Walker, logged onto her MySpace page with the intention of alerting her many friends to the news. To his surprise, there were already 20 to 30 comments on the page lamenting his daughter's death. Eight weeks later, the comments are still coming.

"Hey Lee! It's been a LONG time," a friend named Stacey wrote recently. "I know that you will be able to read this from Heaven, where I'm sure you are in charge of the parties. Please rest in peace and know that it will never be the same here without you!"

Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users in recent years, especially the young, who use them to expand their personal connections and to tell the wider world about their lives.

Inevitably, some of these young people have died -- prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems -- and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time.

Tom Anderson, the president of MySpace, said in an e-mail message that out of concern for privacy, the company did not allow people to assume control of the MySpace accounts of users after their deaths.

"MySpace handles each incident on a case-by-case basis when notified, and will work with families to respect their wishes," Mr. Anderson wrote, adding that at the request of survivors the company would take down pages of deceased users.

"The day I found out about it, I was pretty much devastated," says Jamie Dinkins, who teaches junior high school in Pekin.

Her profile had been posted on MySpace.com, a Web site that links students and young people through photos and personal information. Along with Facebook.com, the popularity of MySpace has exploded over the past couple of years. But Jamie hadn't heard of it until she was confronted with her own face next to the bright comment "I should be fired!"

According to the fake profile with her real picture, Jamie is a 99-year-old female who likes "smokin . . . drinkin, teachin," among more unprintable pastimes. She enjoys hardcore music, "horrible" chick flicks, "Grey's Anatomy" and "anything with sex and drugs."

The message discussed the significance of April 20, which is Adolf Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School attack in Colorado, in which two students wearing trench coats killed 13 people and committed suicide, the sheriff said.

"The message, it was brief, but it stated that there was going to be a shooting at the Riverton school and that people should wear bulletproof vests and flak jackets," Norman said.

School officials identified the student who posted the message and talked to several of his friends, Norman said.

But Riverton school district Superintendent David Walters said the significance of the threat didn't become clear until Wednesday night, after a woman in North Carolina who had chatted with one of the suspects on Myspace.com received more specific information that there would be about a dozen potential victims, at least one of whom was a staff member. She notified authorities in her state, who contacted the sheriff's department, Norman said.

C'mon. Working on a product that "kills" another, popular product is just so...1999.

Here's a better way of looking at it. The AIM Buddy List (which was introduced 10 years ago) was the orignial social network, and it has 43 million AIM and Buddy List users. We're working on adding functionality to AIM that will really open it up -- allowing developers, partners, and users to take part. It's going to be fun. Rather than thinking of it as a killer of anything, let alone MySpace, it will allow our millions of users to express themselves in new and interesting ways and become a catalyst for new communities to grow and flourish. We'll have more to say about it soon.

Jack Stewart, an eighth-grader at Rugby Middle School, laughed when asked if he still used e-mails, now that MySpace and Xanga are on the scene.

"The only reason I use my e-mail is because my grandma sends me e-mails," he said. "She lives in Florida and she'll send me pictures. ... That's about it."

Even instant messaging is being replaced because it's not interactive enough for Stewart and his classmates. Instead, most teens have turned their attention and energies to a more complete way of communication, one that includes carefully selected words and pictures to go with live back-and-forth.

The majority of kids at Rugby have some form of presence on MySpace, and many of those students simultaneously maintain sites on Xanga. The main difference between the two is that Xanga is simpler and allows users to do little more than chat, while MySpace gives much more freedom for personal expression in page design and other forms of media.

I just heard a rumor that AOL is going to challenge MySpace, "head on," to be announced in approximately two weeks.

Meanwhile, Louis Ramos, a freshman at Southern Illinois University, says he has made more than $200,000 since last June by running Pimpmyspace.com and Myspaceeditor.org, two Web sites that offer MySpace users free tools to upgrade and spruce up their profiles with colors and images. MySpace doesn't build many customization options into users' profiles.

Ramos, who makes money by hosting ads from Google's AdSense and ValueClick's FastClick networks, says he's received six-figure offers from Internet companies interested in buying his sites. "Hundreds of people are doing this," he says. Other programmers offer to overhaul MySpace profiles for a fee, charging several hundred dollars for the service.

Entrepreneurs say some of the most successful MySpace spinoff businesses are now being auctioned for thousands of dollars. "People make a ton of money" selling the sites, says Michael Melen, who operates several MySpace-related services. Melen's offerings include Myspacesponsor.com, which shares ad revenues with MySpace users who put banner ads in their profiles, and Unblockmyspace.com, which allows users to surf the site anonymously.

On March 31, 2006 the market share of visits to MySpace Video increased by 1,242%, sending it far ahead of YouTube and the other video search services. As I've written before, MySpace is the leading source of traffic for YouTube, accounting for 23% of its upstream visits for the week ending April 1, 2006. It makes sense that MySpace would launch its own video service and MySpace Videos began showing up in Hitwise data in January, shortly after YouTube began to take off in December. Now that MySpace is owned by News Corp, it has the perfect distribution mechanism for Fox content, and could be testing out its video capability with viral videos, which have been so successful for YouTube.

Teenagers are so obsessed with the site that last year it saw more traffic than Yahoo's email service, Tesco's website and Amazon. Only eBay, Google and Hotmail are viewed more often in Britain.

The site allows its 6 million members to send each other messages. Members have their own mini-sites with pictures of themselves and details of their tastes. They can browse other members' sites and start conversations with thousands of people they have never met.

'I check my messages every single day,' explained 16-year-old James Hardman from Leeds. 'All my mates do it. We want to find some nice lasses and just text and email each other. We're meeting a couple of them in the school holidays.'

James is one of the rare members brave enough to put his phone number on the site, but says he has only been bothered by 'weirdos' once or twice. He is more coy about the 'adult section' of his site, where members can put up naked pictures of themselves and choose who gets to see them. 'My pictures are quite rude but I haven't let anyone see them yet. I'd be very careful about that.'

The popularity of the site has raised concerns: some parents are worried about inappropriate banter on the site, and the possibility that some 'young people' are adults posing as teenagers.

Peter Chernin, president and chief operating officer of News Corp, told the Financial Times that, although he and Mr Murdoch were very optimistic about its prospects when they acquired it last year, MySpace had exceeded their expectations.

"MySpace is more potent and powerful than even we knew," Mr Chernin says. "And it is becoming a more integrated part of people's lives." However, as efforts grow to attract more advertisers to the site, News Corp is facing two challenges. Young users have to keep wanting to use the site, rather than switch to a "cooler" alternative.

Also, advertisers have to feel confident their reputation will not be tainted by "inappropriate" content. Teachers and parents are concerned that, because information on MySpace is publicly available, it might put teenagers in contact with predatory adults. In terms of retaining its appeal, Mr Chernin said users had to keep feeling the site was theirs. "We don't want to change the fundamental look and feel of the site," he said. "We do not want users to have any sense that it is corporatised."

It took students one day to hack their way back to blogging Web sites after technicians blocked them on school computers.

But Fort Wayne Community Schools will keep trying to keep students away from the popular sites, spokeswoman Debbie Morgan told The Journal Gazette for a Sunday story.

School officials say blogging not only distracts students but makes them vulnerable to online predators.

"We don't put all these thousands of dollars of equipment out there in the schools for personal use," said Doug Coutts, the district's chief operations officer. "They're out there for educational purposes."

Students had been able to log on to popular sites including Facebook and MySpace during school, though they were not supposed to do so. Technicians started blocking the sites Thursday, but students had found ways around the new blocks by Friday.

Employers, bankers, insurance brokers, and college admissions officers are becoming wise by using social networking and blogging sites as an addition to traditional background checks, such as credit and criminal history.

The more than 70 million people using these sites make it easy for anyone who wants to learn about them.

"Unfortunately, I think most of the people who are posting those are only thinking about their intended readers," said Steven Rothberg, president and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com, the highest traffic career site used by students, recent graduates, and employers.

"If you're a 20-year-old college student and you like to get drunk on the weekends, you're probably going to put that on your profile because you want to hook up with other people that do the same."

Pennsylvania State University police used Facebook to identify 50 students who stormed the field after the football game against Ohio State this past season.

Naively, the students formed a Facebook group that university police said was titled something like "I stormed the field after Ohio State game."

Police officers were searching for another student who was accused of online harassment when they stumbled upon the group, complete with university e-mails and pictures that clearly incriminated the students.

Punishments for the students ranged from warnings to suspensions.

Q. How do I block a user?
A. To block a user you will need to visit that user's profile click 'Block User' (found underneath 'Send Message').

Clicking 'Block User' will block that user.

Blocked users can still view your profile, but they cannot send you a message or communicate with you. There is no way to prevent someone from seeing your profile.

myspaceWatch.com is a service that allows you to monitor login activity, track profile changes, and keep a running history of up to 3 myspace.com profiles. Are you a parent who banned your child from myspace only to see that they keep logging on, or keeping multiple accounts? Is your significant other living a double life? We keep track and monitor activity so you don't have to. We also don't ask for any of your personal information.

The new Bolt.com takes cues from hot social network MySpace, video-sharing site YouTube and photo destination Flickr. It encourages users to create and share their own digital content, whether it's short videos, snapshots or blogs. And Bolt is reaching beyond teens to the sought-after 18-34 demographic.

"There's a remarkable revolution going on in media consumption for those under 30," said Aaron Cohen, Bolt's CEO. "In the end, marketers have to go where the reach is, and the reach is migrating."

Bolt has fallen far behind top social media sites like MySpace and Facebook. From July to December 2005, its unique monthly visitors fell 60 percent to 1.1 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. So, it's banking on its new focus on creativity and older users to reverse that trend.

After relying heavily on fixed — and thus vulnerable — Web sites until early 2002, al Qaeda quickly switched to hiding its online operations within more legitimate bulletin boards and Internet sites offering free upload services or connecting through such popular social network sites as Orkut and MySpace.

Now on the run, bin Laden's organization is even more virtual, which often means more dependent on the World Wide Web to spread propaganda and plot operations.

It is also one of the main reasons why, despite the many blows that it received since 9/11, many analysts believe the organization's operational capabilities have not truly diminished.

Law enforcement officials in Europe report that the number of such Web sites went from a dozen on Sept. 10, 2001, to close to 5,000 today.

While only a handful are currently operated by al Qaeda officials or militants, they serve a crucial purpose by "spreading activation" and nourishing the outrage or the global Muslim community, therefore laying the groundwork for al Qaeda's fundraising and recruitment activities.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Chris DeWolfe, speaking at an Internet conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, said its big plan for the year is to expand in Europe, Australia and elsewhere.

***

"We need to prove ourselves internationally," DeWolfe said before investors at the Thomas Weisel Partners Internet & Telecom Conference. MySpace, based in Santa Monica, has already taken off in the United Kingdom, he continued, and it is "taking a hard look at China."

DeWolfe did not offer details about doing business in China, a fast-growing Internet market that is a critical, but controversial, focus for Web companies such as Yahoo and Google.

MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought last year for $580 million, has exploded onto the online scene since its premiere in 2003. In January, it had the second-most number of page views, according to comScore Media Metrix, with U.S. Internet users looking at 23 billion MySpace pages. Yahoo came in first at 33 billion and Microsoft's MSN third at nearly 16 billion.

Over at www.Myspace.com, someone named David wrote: "Last night's choice for best picture of the year was very hard for me to accept. Crash is not a film even worth seeing. It is so over the top with its dialogue and caricatures passing off as characters that it amazes me people could get drawn into such conjecture."

For sure the b'sphere will continue to remain the largest galaxy in the social media universe in the short term. It's a major center of gravity that pulls people toward it. However, over the last few months a number other social media galaxies have rapidly risen to prominence. Take YouTube, digg and MySpace. These are just three examples, but they are drawing huge audiences. Richard Edelman is gushing over a fourth - StupidVideos.com.

As these constellations grow, some will become larger and more influential than the blogosphere. We're already seeing early signs of this and the power brokers will shift. For example, mobile jones notes that Technorati's coverage of MySpace is sorely lacking. Technorati also does little to help us mine and track YouTube, digg, StupidVideos.com and countless other smaller galaxies of consumer generated media. They focus on blogs.

Welcome to a world that, if you're older than 25, you likely know little about, and if you're older than 35 you almost certainly don't.

But if you're part of the legion of users - some 41 million at last count for MySpace.com alone - it's the center of your social existence, and people who have hopped the train can’t imagine life without it.

"I've had my MySpace page for about a year," said Harmony Johnson of Hendersonville. "I probably check my MySpace page at least three times a day - it's very addicting. Some people call it 'MyCrack.' You want to see who's posted a new blog or a new photo or left a comment on your page or sent you a message or sent you a friend request."

Jack Stewart, an eighth-grader at Rugby Middle School, laughed when asked if he still used e-mails, now that MySpace and Xanga are on the scene.

"The only reason I use my e-mail is because my grandma sends me e-mails," he said. "She lives in Florida and she'll send me pictures. ... That's about it."