SouthFlorida.com | City Link Magazine

As most South Floridians were struggling with power outages, cold showers, nonworking phones, long lines at gas stations and all the other by-now-familiar miseries created by Hurricane Wilma, Florida Atlantic University student Paige Taft was suffering a previously unheard-of affliction: MySpace withdrawal.

Evacuated from her dorm on the school's Boca Raton campus before the storm struck, Taft went to stay with her parents at an Orlando hotel. "I was up there for a good week and had no Internet access whatsoever," the 18-year-old criminal justice major recalls. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, let me check my MySpace [page].' I was going crazy, and the second they let us back in the dorms, the first thing I did was check MySpace."

Taft's ordeal was surely not unique, as she is but one of MySpace.com's 37 million registered users. Like most of the site's devoted fans, Taft is a member of the rabidly pursued 16-to-34-year-old demographic that has been drawn to MySpace the way emo boys are drawn to bad haircuts.

Based in Los Angeles, the increasingly popular online social network is the brainchild of Tom Anderson, a 29-year-old University of California-Berkeley graduate, and business partner Chris DeWolfe. They pitched the idea to the Internet-based media-and-entertainment network eUniverse (now called Intermix Media) in 2003. Anderson, the former frontman for a San Francisco indie band called Swank, envisioned a site on which bands and artists could promote themselves by posting music, bios, photos and gig schedules. Fans, meanwhile, could listen to music, watch videos and create personalized pages where they could maintain blogs, post photos and list their favorite books, movies and bands. They could also e-mail, instant-message, scan classifieds and add friends, whose photos, links and comments would appear on their profiles.

MySpace officially launched in January 2004. And then as now, each new member got an automatic new friend -- Tom Anderson, who sends every user a message about getting started on the site. "The first thing to do," he noted, "is to invite your friends -- then when they invite your friends, you'll all be connected!"

And so it began. Most MySpace members, living proof of the six degrees of separation theory, refer to Anderson by his first name. They've viewed his online profile (he likes baseball, karaoke and the Los Angeles rock band Jupiter Sunrise) and know him as not only the down-to-earth MySpace founder but also a guy who, like them, wants to discover new music and make friends. To some, Tom is a savior who provided an alternative online-networking universe when Friendster grew bigger and less satisfying. With Tom's face now gracing millions of friends lists, his MySpace presence remains strong. He continues to encourage users to tell him what they want from MySpace. Recent requests have included an "unsend button" for e-mails and a MySpace withdrawal patch for addicts. One 19-year-old Californian simply wrote, "Tom, can I have my life back again?"

MySpace is addictive, not just for bands like Dayton, Ohio's Hawthorne Heights, which has cultivated a fan club of 257,000 MySpace friends, but for the 660,000 other bands and artists vying for exposure through the site. It now attracts 4 million new members a month who are looking for music, friends, parties or love.

That is the main reason News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Fox television networks and many other media entities, forked over $580 million in July to buy MySpace's parent company, Intermix Media. The company has since launched MySpace Records, and other expansion plans are forthcoming.

Some critics have questioned Murdoch's purchase of a Web site whose members routinely send one another comments such as, "Hey dude, thanks for the add," or "You have big boobies. Now comment back, biotch!!!" But MySpace, which hosts more than 12 percent of all online ads, has already surpassed eBay, Hotmail, Google and AOL to rank third in terms of page views. AdWeek recently named it the third-hottest Web destination. Of course, what's most important in the eyes of youth-hungry corporations is that high school- and college-age people compose the bulk of its membership.

While media analysts continue to discuss the potential strategies behind Murdoch's acquisition, Rick Suy, a 25-year-old MySpace fanatic from Boynton Beach, is not worried about the future of the site. "MySpace is pretty much the shit right now," he says. "Everyone's on it."

Suy, president of the South Florida-based Corolla Car Club, uses MySpace to communicate with family and friends but says that's not why he joined. "My best friend told me about it," he says. "He was like, 'Yeah, you gotta sign up on MySpace; there are a lot of girls on there.' So that's really why I signed up."

Many of the site's users admit to spending more time on MySpace than they do on almost anything else, including sleeping. "I could swear that I have ADD or something," Taft says. "I can't stand doing something for more than five minutes without getting bored. But for some reason, I can spend hours looking at MySpace."

Ash Ali, a 28-year-old dispute investigator for a credit card company, admits to spending more than half his workday on MySpace. "Maybe it's the new drug or something," he says. "I think we spend way too much time on that thing. We don't even realize it once we start talking to people. I guess I've become a little popular on there."

Ali, who lives in Pembroke Pines, uses the site to promote his rock band, An Immaculate Affair. Since uploading music five months ago to the band's site, which links to his MySpace page, he has quadrupled his MySpace friends to 6,000 and says he gets 40 or more "friends requests" every morning. A friends request is what its name implies -- someone asking you to be his or her friend. Ali accepts music-related requests but denies those from random people trying to win online popularity contests. "Instead of collecting baseball cards, they're collecting friends," he says. "It's the new obsession."

Taft agrees that the site can become the forum for a popularity contest and that one of her friends has accumulated 2,000 MySpace friends. "It's definitely a competition among people," Taft says. "I have a friend named Mandy. We always have about the same amount, so I always check to see if I have more friends than she does. Like, we're always in competition to see who has the most friends."

After joining MySpace, Taft parked herself at a computer and started looking for friends to add. "If I saw my [friend's site] and she had friends that looked cool, I'd add them, too," she explains.

When Taft gets random friends requests, she adds them if they're not creepy. But to keep making friends, a user must be proactive. Sometimes, Taft persuades offline friends to join MySpace so she can add them. She also joins groups. "In the past two weeks, I've had, like, five people a day ask me to join a MySpace group, and I didn't even know who they were. But I joined anyway." She also explores Cool New People, which features profiles of new MySpace members. "I'll click on them, and if I like the same music, I'll send them a message and say, 'We have the same taste in music. I was wondering if you wanted to be my friend.' "

So far, Taft has more than 350 friends. She also adds bands and monitors friends' pages for new music. When she finds a band she likes, Taft will buy its CDs and, if possible, attend its shows. Recently, after discovering the Las Vegas band Panic at the Disco!, Taft went to see the band when it came to Fort Lauderdale. Last month alone, she spent $400 on concert tickets.

Taft is excited about MySpace Records: Volume 1, a compilation of songs by unsigned, indie and major-label acts including Fall Out Boy, Weezer, The All-American Rejects and Hollywood Undead, the first band signed to MySpace Records.

Even major-label acts such as Nine Inch Nails, Audioslave, Billy Corgan and The Black Eyed Peas recognize the value of MySpace exposure and have set up pages on the site. Last month, Madonna streamed excerpts from her new album, Confessions on a Dancefloor, on her MySpace page.

With so many features on the site, MySpace users boast to one another about how many hours they spend on it but downplay that amount of time to nonmembers who, they believe, wouldn't understand their addiction. "We admit it to ourselves that, yeah, we're addicted to it," Ali says. "But we don't show anyone else in public that we're addicted. … It's like, 'Get a life, man.' "

Many of the site's critics, Taft argues, are nonconformists who feel MySpace has become too popular. Yet this is exactly what Aubri Fox, a 25-year-old toy distributor who works weekends at Tate's Comics in Lauderhill, loves about it.

"The good thing about MySpace being so big is that there are more people you can find or meet," he says. "I find people on here from high school who would never have done something like Friendster because it's low-key and kind of cultish, but they're on MySpace."

News Corp. seems to be banking on the fact that this trend will continue. The company's involvement, however, has refueled the rumor plaguing MySpace since its inception: that the site will start charging a membership fee. Some users worry, despite Anderson's bulletins assuring them otherwise, that the new owners will bombard them with ads, exploit their privacy or censor content.

Shortly after the sale was announced, fake Rupert Murdoch profiles began surfacing on MySpace. In one, the media tycoon lists world domination, the Bush family and get-togethers at Bill O'Reilly's house among his interests. Another page features an illustration of Anderson carrying suitcases and saying, "See you emo fags later! -- Tom."

"Everyone seems scared MySpace is going to change," Anderson wrote in a bulletin to users. "I'm not leaving and I'm still making the decisions about this site, and I'm not going to let things suck."

While MySpace users complain that advertisements have become more intrusive and technical difficulties more frequent, many of them believe Tom won't let them down. "I don't think anything bad is going to happen," Fox says. "Tom is still in charge, and I think Rupert Murdoch is actually as far from MySpace as anybody could possibly be. It's just the parent companies, and that's just a financial thing. I don't think they're going to start censoring."

While it's impossible to predict whether MySpace will retain its character as part of the Murdoch empire, it's certain that other sites wanting a piece of this demographic's action will continue to emerge. Facebook, an increasingly popular online database of college students developed last year by Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg, now boasts 9.4 million users and rates ninth in overall Web traffic, according to Internet tracking service ComScore. Facebook counts 36,000 students at seven South Florida colleges among its users.

Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes says that unlike MySpace, his site is grounded in specific college communities. "Facebook is not a place where a user meets a random person," he explains, "but instead one where individuals foster acquaintanceships or friendships that already exist."

Taft found 40 to 50 old classmates on Facebook who weren't on MySpace -- not that she's leaving MySpace. Like many college students, she belongs to both sites. "When I get home and check MySpace, I always check Facebook afterward," she says. "But MySpace always comes first."

Welcome to MySpace, losers

The maker of the "MySpace Ruined My Life" T-shirt is tapping into a proudly self-loathing market.

by Colleen Dougher

If someone tells you that MySpace is for losers, don't get offended. It's likely this person is simply acknowledging his or her own membership in the growing collective of MySpace addicts who joke about how they really do need to get a life. As one South Florida fan of the increasingly popular networking site noted on an online message board, "Don't you people know that MySpace is for losers? … Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to check my comments and send a message to Tom."

Given that addiction to the site has become a source of pride, it was only a matter of time before someone began marketing parody MySpace T-shirts. Fatshirts.net has introduced one that reads "MySpace -- A Place for Losers." One of the most popular shirts, which bears the words "MySpace Ruined My Life," was created by Virgil Dickerson, founder of the Colorado-based Suburban Home Records and its Super Fantastic Clothing.

Dickerson and his staff came up with that idea for the shirt after everyone in their office had abandoned Friendster for MySpace. "It was something we kind of all embraced," Dickerson explains. "But at the same time, we realized it definitely kills a lot of time. I'd walk by somebody's computer, and it was on MySpace. An hour later, I'd walk by it, and it's on MySpace."

Dickerson says one of the site's main draws, aside from its being faster than Friendster, is that it offers more features, many of which have been known to wreak havoc in people's personal lives. Take, for instance, the new Top 8. Before this feature was introduced, MySpace users listed their friends on their profiles in order of seniority; that is, the date each had joined the site. But now, users can place their eight favorite friends at the top of their list. Suffice it to say that people who expect to make a friend's Top 8 and don't aren't always happy about it.

"I think it's going to obviously bring up some issues where, OK, you've got eight friends," Dickerson admits. "At what point do you decide that OK, friend No. 8 is off and new friend No. 8 is in?"

The relationship status listed on users' profiles creates even more quandaries. For instance, what if a woman describes her status as "in a relationship" before her partner does? "Actually, making the switch is even more of a conscious decision than five years ago, where you'd just be like, 'Yeah, we're dating now,' no big deal," Dickerson says.

Now, it's such a big deal that when three of his staffers changed their status from single to "in a relationship" in the same week, Dickerson threw a party. "It was one of those funny things where we had an intern who worked at Cold Stone Creamery," he recalls, "and she had access to make ice-cream cakes for free for us. So we made a joke and had a cake that said, 'Congratulations on Your MySpace Upgrade Kyle, Joey and Naomi.'

"I think every day there's an occurrence where you're like, 'Wow, this could have been a Seinfeld episode," Dickerson adds. "I think it's comical that so many things happen as a result of MySpace, and it's interesting to see how it will develop now that Rupert Murdoch has control."

"MySpace Ruined My Life" T-shirts are available for $13.99 at Superfantasticclothing.com.

Win These!

For a chance to win one of these shirts, e-mail cdougher@citylinkmagazine.com.