MySpace

From ArticleWorld

MySpace is a website that offers interactive networks of blogs, photos, groups, profiles and other such features, including an internal e-mail system. MySpace is currently the 7th most popular English language website, having more than 70,000,000 users. MySpace was founded by Tom Anderson, and was partially owned by Intermix Media, which was bought by News Corporation in 2005.

MySpace.com originally belonged to another company who was providing online storage and file sharing services. The website was shut down due to the slow service and a lack of profit.

Culture

Since MySpace has a great number of users, many have suggested that a special culture is developing inside it, especially in the alternative scene. MySpace is strongly focused on pictures and a great facility in communication, allowing groups to be discovered while only randomly browsing around. MySpace.com has comprehensive and interesting user profiles, allowing strong contacts to be established easily.

Criticism

The most serious criticism is connected to the very slow service. The traffic is very high, and new members are registering continuously, so the administrators find themselves forced to undergo several maintenance operations, trying to speed up the service. New features constantly added and frequent downtimes slow down the service to a significant extent.

Since profiles can be customized by everyone, it is common for people who are not web developers to construct disastrous profiles. MySpace.com profiles have even frozen some web browser, because of bad CSS practices, and users often place many bandwidth-intensive files in the profiles. Several security issues have appeared as well. It is possible to place malicious codes in the profiles, and, in 2005, a cross-site scripting vulnerability was found.

Since the number of users is very big, thorough checking of all profiles is hard to perform. Therefore, many users have posted indecent pictures, violating the Terms of Service, and many sections are very profane. Many schools and universities decided to simply block access to MySpace.