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MySpace & Facebook – What Is All The Fuss?

Simon Reilly

Not to sound like a prude in the dark ages, I’ve been wondering what all the fuss has been about.

Over the past two months I’ve had business acquaintances sending me an autoresponder e-mail from Facebook to let me know that they would like to be my friend. I checked back in my data base to see who one of them was and they had sold me car with top notch service about 5 years ago. What constitutes a friend on Facebook anyway? Then a real friend sent me an autoresponder e-mail from Facebook over the weekend which caused me to register.

Still, why do I need Facebook … What is the gist of it?

After further investigation at Wikipedia I get the gist of where these social networking websites came from … to me they are kind of like retargeted mini versions of the world wide web … one started with Harvard and the other eUniverse which expanded to the outside world wide web.

In my mind, I already have a Facebook and MySpace and it is called the Leading Advisor Web Site and Simon Reilly’s Blog.

Here are some Facebook and MySpace definitions clipped from Wikipedia.

Facebook – When launched on February 4, 2004, Facebook was restricted to students of Harvard, membership was subsesequently expanded to all Ivy League schools (within two months), and many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually anyone with a college or university(.edu) email address could join, and there was a separate network for high schools. Since September 11th, 2006 it has been made available to any email address[3]. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a high school, place of employment, or geographic region.

The very first MySpace users were eUniverse employees, the company held contests to see who could sign-up the most users[9] The company then used its resources to push MySpace to the masses. eUniverse used its 20 million users and e-mail subscribers to quickly breathe life into MySpace [2], and move it to the head of the pack of social networking websites. A key architect was tech expert Toan Nguyen who helped stabilize the Myspace platform when Brad Greenspan asked him to join the team.[10]