MySpace
MySpace’s history is very interesting and it all starts with Chris DeWolf. Chris DeWolf grew up with his parents who where teachers in Portland Oregon. Rather than follow in their footsteps, DeWolf decided to go to business school at the University of Washington, then USC Marshall School of Business. Chris mastered forms of online marketing, including e-mail advertising and pop-up advertising as an employee of XDrive, a startup company that provided free online storages space for photos, music, and files. After the Internet blow up, he built a site that let people download computer cursors in the form of waving flags. DeWolf is 41 and is currently MySpace’s CEO. Co-founder Tom Anderson AKA “Tom-Guy,” is every user’s first friend when they initially log into MySpace. He majored in English and rhetoric at Berkeley and attended film school. Though Anderson lists over 140 million friends on his MySpace profile, according to him, “In person, I don’t have that many friends.... Offline, I have no more than four or five friends.” As the friendly face of the giant MySpace Corporation, Anderson has become a household name. There are popular t-shirts reading “I have more friends than Tom!” or “Tom is not my friend.” Also the lead singer of the popular Gym Class Heroes includes a reference to MySpace in the lyrics “My man Tom introduced us, but I was too shy to say hi.” Anderson’s real age became an issue for some users and critics in 2007 when it was revealed that Anderson is actually five years older than he claims. His online profile currently lists his age as 32, but he was actually born on Nov 8, 1970. From 2005-2006 the amount of MySpace users went up from 2 million to 80 million. With this new found popularity for MySpace, serious safety issues began to plague the popular site. Some critics felt that it would be relatively easy to reconstruct social security numbers using information in profiles, such as hometown and date of birth. It also became a big place for business and other corporations to market themselves. People started to drift away after it became more of a marketing sight then a social network. For me in example I got so sick of signing on and seeing 20 new friend requests and them all being business or bands trying to promote themselves. Also a big problem is the increasing sexual predators and pedophiles on the site. I do not trust this site and will most likely never be using it again.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The website was originally made for Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, and Stanford University. Later the website started to spread further to include any university student, high school students, and anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide. This website blew up to what it is today that is cause MySpace turned into more of a marketing site for business instead of a social network. Though business do advertise on Facebook there not taking over the whole site like what happened to MySpace. It’s a nice way to keep in touch with people and chat with friends. It’s more of a social network to share pictures, what you are doing and whatever else you want to share. Though it’s a good website and virtually everyone has one there are many risks involved. I posted a video in my next blog about the real meaning behind the terms and agreements. Everyone just clicks except not many people actually sit and read the terms. But if you were to you will learn everything that is on Facebook is not owned by you anymore. Your photos to what you put up there can be shown to anyone nothings private. I will always have my Facebook but I will watch what I put up cause you never know who is looking at your page.
LinkenIn is a website that is set up to establish a social network. It was officially founded in 2003 when the site was launched on May 5th. At firs the five founders invited about 350 of there most important contacts to join there website. After a month of operation the website had 4,500 members in the network. At the end of 2003 the website grew to about 81,000 members, by the end of 2004 they had 1.6 million members. Then in March of 2005 LinkedIn put up a service that will help members of the website find job opportunities. And by May 5th 2009, 6 years after it was first launched it has grown to 40 million members. Now LinkedIn has over 65 million members in over 200 different countries. 
