Results for "MySpace"

Jonathan Abrams launched Friendster, which became the first social networking site to achieve mass-market adoption. At its peak it had 115 million registered users. It was eventually overtaken by MySpace and later Facebook, but Friendster was the proof-of-concept that social networking could work at scale.

MySpace launched and quickly became the most visited website in the United States, overtaking Google in 2006. It introduced millions of people to profile pages, friend lists, the all-important Top 8, and the ability to embed a song that played automatically — often a source of great annoyance to anyone opening your page at work.

Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook.com from his Harvard dorm room. Initially only available to Harvard students, it expanded to other universities within months. Unlike Friendster and MySpace which allowed pseudonyms, Facebook required real names — a controversial decision that would shape social media forever.

Facebook dropped its university-only requirement and opened registration to anyone over 13 with a valid email address. Within a year it surpassed MySpace as the most popular social network in the world. The moment marked the beginning of the mainstream social media era.

News Corporation announced it was acquiring Intermix Media — the parent company of MySpace — for approximately $580 million in cash. At the time, MySpace was the internet's fastest-growing social networking site and the fifth-ranked web domain by page views. The deal, engineered by Rupert Murdoch, marked traditional media's first serious bet on social networking, just a few years before Facebook would make the acquisition look like a very expensive mistake.