Post No.2 - MySpace Origins

So I've been a member of MySpace for over a week now, I've been given suggestions from other people on ways to customise my page and have been able to create a much more personalised color scheme. I have been able to find more of my 'real world' friends that have pages that I didn't know about, through looking at the pages of other friends. I've also added a 'celebrity' to my friends list. Hayden Panettiere from Heroes has a MySpace page where she posts music tracks of hers for people to listen to. -Which was my only experience with MySpace before I signed up myself.

MySpace was launched in January 2004, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought MySpace in July 2006 for $580 million, however they have kept DeWolfe and Anderson still at the reins as CEO and president. Originally created as an alternative of Friendster.com, MySpace became a place where musicians could share their music with the public, and has since launched the careers of artists who would otherwise be virtually unknown. Friends can also share the music they like by adding songs as background music for their MySpace page, or creating a playlist feature to choose tracks from. As well, people can post videos of all varieties into their pages.MySpace has also recently created its own record label which has released artists, such as rap band 'Hollywood Dead', which developed a large fan following on MySpace.

MySpace has become the new teen culture, in the sense that before teens would spend hours talking on the phone, they now spend hours posting comments on friends pages, browsing the pages of strangers and making new friends, as well as spending a great deal of time creating the look of their own pages. 'Pimpmyspace.org' is a site that has thousands of images and tools to create the desired look. Through searching this site you can search for certain themes or characters, or browse through the categories. Once you find something you want, you copy the html code provided straight into the area you want it to go on your MySpace page. I tested this out myself, with a 'glittering' Care Bears gif image. It just gives a little 'pizzazz' to the page.

A few years ago when meeting new people, we would trade email and msn addresses. Now every time I make a new friend, they ask me if I have MySpace. I have friends who don't use email but will happily contact you through MySpace. -Which I find a tad ridiculous!


Internet Links used for the creation of this post:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-01-08-myspace-teens_x.htm
http://www.pimpmyspace.org/


-Carlie Sheehan

1st Post - Welcome to MySpace.com

For this assignment, I chose to sign up to MySpace and create my own online profile. Before now I had been boycotting MySpace, but will participate for the sake of an assignment. I found signing up fairly simple, although the security levels encoded in MySpace make it difficult to use a regular password for signing in. -So I have to remember yet another different password for yet another user ID. When it came to creating my personal profile, adding the information was very straight forward. Decorating the MySpace page to make it customized to give it my own personal flare was not so simple, and will require a decent amount of time spent working to get it right. Making friends is made easy, with email addresses being taken straight from your Hotmail, yahoo or other contacts. At this stage I have 3 friends, including a MySpace 'guide'. And have already engaged in private messages with an old high school friend. The hard part of using MySpace is locating your page once you have visited a different page. It's easiest to sign out and sign back in again. In the coming weeks I will explore the many possibilities of a MySpace profile, including adding music and my own personal picture galleries.

http://www.myspace.com/carliesheehan

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Carlie