not only an early internet success – but a seminal web site for the movement we now call social media. 

very simple management mistake News Corp. made.  News Corp tried to guide MySpace, to add planning, and to use “professional management” to determine the business’s future.  That was fatally flawed when competing with Facebook which was managed in White Space, lettting the marketplace decide where the business should go.

If you have an idea for networking on something, Facebook pushed its tech folks to make it happen.  And they kept listening.

And it was becoming clear that Myspace's global effort—fueled by extravagant new offices around the world (the Smashing Pumpkins headlined the rollout in Madrid)—wasn't working. Facebook was attracting international users at a rapid rate without the expense of opening offices. Facebook was winning.

"O.K., so you're going to have three guys to run this company that have really never worked together and have really never been on the site and don't really understand it?" DeWolfe asks. "It was a bad decision."

"After we left, the guys that took over were never Myspace users," says DeWolfe, who now runs a startup called MindJolt. "They didn't have it in their DNA."

One of the site's first breakthroughs, for example, came by accident. Shortly after launching in August 2003, Myspace developers realized they had accidentally permitted users to insert Web markup code, allowing them to play around with the background colors and personalize their pages, leading to the site's kaleidoscopic, techno-junkyard aesthetic, which became its trademark.

Jackson still hustles for attention on the lower rungs of fame—he currently stars in season five of Celebrity Rehab, in which he battles his addiction to growth hormones for cable television viewers.

this year

"Getting people to come back to something that in their minds has become less useful is an incredible challenge on the Web—just ask AOL,"

Facebook offered something as basic as being able to actually see your real friends vs. anonymous friends.

"We tried to create every feature in the world and said, 'O.K., we can do it, why should we let a third party do it?' " said DeWolfe. "We should have picked five to ten key features that we totally focused on and let other people innovate on everything else."

It can boost our self-esteem, satisfy our need for connectedness and self-promotion, and help us maintain offline relationships.

The sociable, the lonely and the narcissistic among us may turn to Facebook to satisfy different needs.

site's appeal into two areas: the need to belong and the need for self-presentation. Facebook, Hofmann says, satisfies both of those basic needs.

“fear of missing out” phenomenon resonates with only a small proportion of the Facebook population

Users say they especially appreciate photos and videos from friends

84% of users say that this aspect of Facebook life doesn’t bother them at all

While the reasons for joining and using Facebook were not entirely homogenous, one factor kept emerging as the strongest motivation for use: the desire to keep in touch with friends.

it’s not just the connection itself that matters. It’s easy enough to support someone in private but far harder to voice that same support publicly—and the public support is a much stronger sign of actual support

Not only are we affirming our connections in a way that sends a strong public signal, we are doing it with a lot of people at once. “We’re being allowed to essentially scale up and maintain our social networks and connections,” Gosling said. “That’s one of the reasons people become so obsessed with it—and freaked out by it.”

(1) the need to belong and (2) the need for self-presentation.

Before 2009, MySpace led the social network race. By April 2009, it was dead. A 2008 study by E. Hargittai found that Hispanic students made up 25% of the MySpace population as compared to only 14% of Facebook users. The demographics of Facebook are quite different. Women are more likely to use Facebook than men, and Hispanic students were less likely to use it than Caucasians.

Facebook use intensity reduced perceived levels of loneliness, but FB's improvement of a user's social life did not improve the user's self-esteem.