UPDATE: The MySpace.com craze, your friend Tom making Millions

Tom Anderson is living a slightly altered but wholly modern version of the rock-and-roll dream. His previous San Francisco band, Swank, lived and died in musical obscurity in the late 1990s. Since then Anderson started music orientated social network site, MySpace.com. On July 18, its parent company, Intermix, was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million and some change.

Anderson, co-founded the youth-oriented, social network that combines music and the youth's craze for meeting new friends on social networks. Teens have been flocking to Tom's social network MySpace, which debuted in late 2003, gave musicians free Web sites on which to post their songs. It also let music fans build their own Web pages touting their favorite music and connect with like-minded enthusiasts. The concept worked. MySpace, which never spent money on advertising, now has 22.5 million registered users, most of them teens in the sweet spot of online advertisers.

MySpace.com holds the highly coveted, 16- to 34-year demographics, that often spend hours on MySpace, communicating, messaging, blogging, surfing personals and more.

Backlash:  MySpace President and co-founder Anderson, tried to calm their fears. He sent a note to members shortly after the deal was announced, saying that the site will not change. He also addressed rampant rumors that were sparked by the sale. The full text of the brief note said:

"Many of you have asked about NewsCorp buying MySpace.... Everyone seems scared that MySpace is going to change. I'm not leaving, and I'm still making the decisions about the site, and I'm not going to let things suck.

"The rumors people are reposting in bulletins are not true: 1) We are not going to become a pay site. 2) We are not increasing advertising. 3) We are not allowing anyone to monitor the site. 4) We are not deleting any content or censoring people in any new way. (we've always deleted nude pics and hate speech) 5) We are not exploiting anyone's data or violating anyone's privacy.

"MySpace has been my life for almost two years now. I know it's as important to others as it is to me. I won't let it get jacked up."

To Come: Only time will tell about this, online dot-com craze MySpace, rather it will be boom in months and years to come or bust. Fox will definitely pour it's global, and entertainment resources promoting and distributing content. But this will only last as long as user's our spending their time at their space.

The Update: Since July, MySpace.com has turned into a teenage-young adult culture, nearly 11 million more accounts were created, adding nearly 85,000 users a day, the company says 3 million a month.  The average teenager (60 million of Generation Y of course are not all on MySpace, but those who are take our share of time,) spends one hour and 40 minutes a month on the site (more serious ones spend more time,) writing blogs, listening to music, and viewing one another's photos. Users are uploading an average 1.8 million photos a day on Myspace, "Myspace flaggers," meanwhile, manually view uploaded photos and delete any that violate MySpace's no-nudity policy. The average MySpace user has 68 friends.

MySpace has plans to begin radio programming and podcasting. The first MySpace music release, a CD of unsigned MySpace bands, is due out in November.  MySpace touts nearly 400,000 small bands.

Recently the social-network passed Google, yes the $90 billion dollar media search engine giant, in the number of monthly pages viewed, according to Comscore MediaMetrix, a company that tracks Web traffic. 

At what cost, nearly zero dollars... its little over 140 employees in Santa Monica, CA., made a reported $7 million last quarter in online advertising revenue.  With most cost of MySpace, in monitoring and keeping the site up. Since nearly all content is created by users and bands.

Yahoo! to Rival MySpace? Yahoo! Inc. the world's most popular website, reaching 1 billion page views a day, with its Yahoo! 360 has its sights set on MySpace's territory.  No doubt, Yahoo! can leverage its online presence to garner traffic to its 360.  Yahoo! didn't shy away from speculation with its latest acquisition of Upcoming.org, a web-based event planning app. Yahoo's general manager of Local said "We're not only after more of a presence in the event space. It's important to tap into the energy of a community as vibrant as Upcoming's is." 

With all features of Yahoo! connected, with Instant Messenger that heavily promotes 360, to Yahoo! Photos, Yahoo! Podcasting, Yahoo! Blogsearching, Yahoo! Local and Yahoo! Search.  Yahoo! will be a player, in the game.  Imagine all local community events, users, blogs, photos, and local music to be searchable for the users.  Yahoo! will stumble upon users, then advertisers will follow, this all in likely in year or two to come as they position themselves. To take on the MySpace Craze.

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