If you’re under the age of 25, chances are you’ve already heard of MySpace, the social networking website has users of all ages and backgrounds, but is aimed squarely at teenagers. MySpace has become something of a cult, with a rabidly loyal following of roughly 60 million young adults. As of March 2006, www.myspace.com is the eighth most popular website in the world, a jaw-dropping achievement for a startup that’s less than three years old!

The core concept of the site is somewhat difficult to pin down. It’s a bit of a cross between pure blogging services like blogger.com and social networking ones like Orkut. Although the idea is to let everyone have their own personal “space” where they can publish their ideas, thoughts and opinions, the emphasis is on what your networked friends have to say rather than your own writing.

If you want to join in the excitement, go ahead and sign up for an account. You’ll have to type in your first and last names and choose a password (but no username – you log in using the email address you supply). The password you choose has to contain numbers and letters, a great idea to prevent people from choosing weak passwords, that is nonetheless surprising to see. After that, you’re prompted to upload photos of yourself and invite all your friends to sign up for the service if they haven’t already. Putting your photograph and contact details online for the world to see isn’t always the best idea, but MySpace users don’t seem to be very bothered by privacy concerns. If you don’t put up a photo and profile information, you’re pretty much defeating the purpose of the site and won’t get very much out of it. The choice is yours.

There are ads all over your homepage and it isn’t immediately clear how to go about doing what you want to. But you’ll definitely feel a buzz of energy around this site which to a certain extent makes up for its cluttered, saturated look. The first thing most people do is fill out as much profile information as they can and publish it for the world to see. The second thing they do is customize their “Spaces”.

Yes, the core appeal of the website is customization and personalization. Everything from the background and font colours to the layout and graphics can be tweaked. Background sound and embedded video can be added. Every page module can contain rich content, which is both a good and a bad thing. The problem with this is a lot of pages take an age to load and are often downright ugly, with gaudy colors and dozens of pictures. Unskilled users are often in competition to see who can “pimp” their spaces and “bling” them out best. Homepages take precedent over the content they are host to, which in part helps make sense of the storm currently raging amongst web analysts that MySpace has inspired. Whatever little text a MySpace page contains is usually mangled, garbled online lingo lik dis wid no rgrd 4 speling or grammr. No wonder MySpace is so popular with teens; it actively fosters a disregard for discipline and convention!

Anyway, once you’ve gotten over the dumbing-down of the internet generation, you’ll start exploring the website and discovering lots of cool features. MySpace is host to a number of independent musicians who use their pages to reach out to and attract new fans. In fact it’s so popular that a number of big established names are setting up pages to interact with their fanbase as well. There’s a section that features the videos uploaded by members for everyone to see, and a very active community forum where members post everything from workout tips to stock market tutorials. Members can send each other private messages, play games, read their horoscopes, find old schoolmates and storm the chatrooms. There’s a very popular dating and matchmaking service too, which should hardly come as a surprise!

At this point it’s worth mentioning that MySpace has also recently been in the news for becoming a playground for sexual predators. Young teens are generally unaware about the potential dangers of putting too much personal information online for the world to see, and continue to do so at an alarming rate. The website has recently appointed staff members to review images and content posted by members, but the amount of content to sift through is overwhelming. In fact many teenagers post detailed information about their lives with such reckless abandon that many parents are reportedly trying to find their kids’ MySpace pages to keep tabs on their activities!