MySpace is the most popular social networking site in the US and the second most popular social networking site after Facebook in the world. Owned by News Corp, MySpace was launched in 2002 and the first users were the employees of eUniverse. The site gradually expanded and went to head the chart of social networking sites.

MySpace has many features for providing a unique web experience to the users. It provides status updates under ‘blurbs’, blogging features, photo uploads (powered by Fotoflexer) and comments for all the viewers to read. MySpace also allows HTML customisation for many of its features like’About Me’, ‘Interests’ and ‘I would like to meet’ where the users can also embed flash-based content and videos. But poorly formatted pages do cause accessability problems. There is also a facility to upload music to the profile pages using MySpace music.

The other features include bulletins, groups, Instant Messenger, MySpace TV (similar toYouTube video), MySpace Mobile, News, karoke, polls, forums and Classifieds. YouTube made its first appearance on MySpace as it provided a facility to embed YouTube videos, propelling YouTube to popularity.

MySpace music is perhaps the biggest differentiator of MySpace from other social networking sites. Users can upload their MP3 collections on MySpace music, create their playlists and unsigned users can also sell their music on MySpace. MySpace also launched its own record label to discover unknown artists growing on MySpace. It is slowly growing as a site for users interested in music and entertainment.

MySpace makes its revenues mainly from advertisements as it operates on a no-paid user model. But this again is becoming a problem for MySpace as most of its users are younger than that of Facebook and have less value in the eyes of the advertisers. There have also been concerns about the lack of anti-spam and anti-phishing measures being taken by MySpace. MySpace has also found problems with child predators, though News Corp has taken steps to prevent such actions in future.

Since 2006, MySpace has also launched many regional versions and currently 28 such versions are available. Today, MySpace has lost its top place to the evergrowing popularity of Facebook and many say that the lifecycle of MySpace is gradually coming to a close. The site is into aggressive strategies to make a come back and find its popular charts again.