| Acquired by | Fox Interactive Media |
| Price | $580M |
| Date | 7/05 |
| Terms | Cash |
| Website | myspace.com |
| Category | Web |
| Employees | 800 |
| Founded | 8/03 |
MySpace is a popular social networking site that lets friends share, message and stay connected. The site lets you browse profiles, blog, email and join groups. MySpace also has videos, music and classifieds. Music artists can add friends, stream singles, and sell music, a concoction that has led to extremely viral success for artists such as Lily Allen and M.I.A.
Rupert Murdoch-helmed News Corp. acquired MySpace in June 2005 under its interactive business unit Fox Interactive Media based out of Los Angeles. Fox Interactive Media’s sole purpose is to build a dynamic portfolio of digital properties for News Corp. providing them better online reach for their other divisions. FIM president Ross Levinsohn wants FIM to “become one of the most exciting and innovative destinations on the Web.”
| Website | myspace.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | January, 2004 |
| Tags | myspace, myspace-music, social-networking |
| Launch Date | June 26, 2008 |
Data Availability is MySpace’s data portability standards project. The project essentially makes key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.
The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites. But that doesn’t bridge the gap between independent, autonomous websites, MySpace says. Every site remains an island.
But with Data Availability, partners will be able to access MySpace user data, combine it with their own, and present it on their sites outside of the normal widget framework. Friends lists can be syncronized, for example. Or Twitter may use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends.
