MYSPACE
Myspace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music, and videos. Its headquartered in Beverly Hills, California.
From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the largest social networking site in the world, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States.
As of March 2017, Myspace was ranked 3,178 by total Web traffic, and 1,650 In the United States.
Myspace had a significant influence on pop culture and music and created a gaming platform that launched the successes of Zynga and RockYou, among others. Despite an overall decline, in 2015 Myspace still had 50.6 million unique monthly visitors and has a pool of nearly 1 billion active and inactive registered users.
In June 2009, Myspace employed approximately 1,600 employees.
In June 2011, Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake jointly purchased the company for approximately $35 million. On February 11, 2016 it was announced that MySpace and its parent company had been bought by Time Inc.
After all that what do we get? Pretty much just memories of this guy :
What killed Myspace you ask? Well according to Edward King, an old Myspace employee;
“I think the main problem was too much friction in the browsing experience on MySpace. The main source of this friction was the profile page, which gave user's more freedom of expression than Facebook's profile walls, but ultimately took far too long to load, crashed people's browsers and meant that the UI elements constantly changed from profile to profile.”
While Myspace was in steady decline there were two sites slowly making their way to center stage; Second Life and LinkedIn.
In late 2002, Reid recruits a team of old colleagues from SocialNet and PayPal to work on a new idea. Six months later, LinkedIn launches. Growth is slow at first—as few as 20 signups on some days—but, by the fall, it shows enough promise to attract an investment from Sequoia Capital.
Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO of LinkedIn.
The battle for social media supremacy continued until 2006 when the internet world was provided access to what was once only available to Harvard College students as an intranet.
No social media article would be complete without addressing Facebook, so let’s do that now.
Facebook is a social networking service launched on February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow Harvard University student Eduardo Saverin. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone of age 13 and older with a valid email address.
But where did it all start you ask?
On October 23, 2003 a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg sat at his computer after a few drinks and began blogging. This is what happened:
“I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 pm and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendiedous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”
An hour later…
And finally…
AND FACEBOOK WAS BORN