The connection between someone in Leeds and a comedian in Los Angeles would probably never happen if it weren't for MySpace, so it enables friendship and connection far more than it limits it.Collection: Friendship
In one sense, Facebook is very focused as an address book, as efficient communication. It's like e-mail or like IM or something like that. And we do those things, too, but we do so much more. We try to focus on the whole world and all the things that people are interested in, rather than just people to people, or one to one communication.Collection: Communication
We had a much bigger vision than creating a dating site.Collection: Dating
The Impact Channel and OurPlanet were created to increase awareness of environmental and social causes within the MySpace community.Collection: Environmental
I had looked at dating sites and niche communities like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente, as well as Friendster, and I thought, 'They're thinking way too small.'Collection: Dating
When I left the work world, I started designing my dream house. I dived into architecture and bought seven vacant lots. My plan was to build one house, move in, and build the next. If the next was better, I'd move in and sell the previous one - so on and so forth.Collection: Architecture
MySpace gives our members the ability to reach such an incredible range of people and have direct contact with them. I'm not sure how that devalues friendship so much as it expands the range of potential friends you can have.Collection: Friendship
If you knew me before Myspace, you'd probably thought I'd have been a scholar teaching philosophy in a university my whole life. If you met me before college, you'd probably have thought I'd be a musician for my entire life.
I wouldn't single out Facebook as a concern, because we've got different local competitors around the world.
It can be a little scary. Like one time I posted a link to NPR because I thought it was interesting, and it took down their Web site.
We asked people why they didn't go to MySpace. A lot of people thought it was too hard to use, they thought it was a music site, or a content site. Privacy was a concern, or they'd say it was a site for teenagers.
The very first plan I wrote for MySpace was that it would be a portal, but a portal wrapped around your user profile.
Time is the most important thing to me - how can you do all the things you want to do with such limited time... I'm hoping science of life extension makes progress.
I think people are feeling more artistic and creative with something like Instagram that makes editing easy. That's a good thing for sure.
I don't know exactly where my life will lead. Adventure and the unknown has always been appealing to me.
Newscorp has always been, for us, very easy to work with and they respect our opinions and let us run the site we wanted to. And, in fact, they wanted to keep us on. They weren't saying, hey, let's throw these guys out. They were buying into what MySpace was and the founders, and so it's been very good for me.
MySpace is so much more about culture and about creativity and expression. So in other words, you go on MySpace and you can find music, and you can find video, and things about politics, and things like that.
And I always say sign up for MySpace and see what your kid is doing. Be his friend on MySpace. Know what your child is doing online because you're going to know more there than you'd ever know when he goes to school.
We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to. We didn't stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace.
It made a lot of sense to me that the music part of our site would work for filmmakers as well. They'll be able to upload clips. There will be a section where you can watch what they are doing. They'll tell where their screenings are. It took a lot longer than we wanted to because we were growing so fast.
On Friendster, if you were a band and you made a profile, they would delete it. They didn't want bands on their site.
It always helps to have someone who can say, No, we can do it faster this way, or We have to break the rules, even our own rules, to get things done.
During MySpace's run-up, journalists continually got their facts wrong about MySpace. They wrote story after story about how Facebook was bigger than MySpace when in truth Facebook wasn't even 1/10th the size of MySpace.
Popular opinion is the biggest 'filter' for most people - they don't have to try something if they've already been told it's not cool.
Safety' hysteria destroyed MySpace in the press. It got MySpace banned from schools, Apple stores, and by well-meaning parents who had been terrorized by what they were reading.
Making a website is similar to making a movie-hundreds of people work on it, one person makes the final decision, and they make them every minute of the day.
People aren't interested in music on Facebook in the way they are on MySpace, that's one of the big keys here.
We can't allow somebody to create a service like that, which reveals who's looking at your page. That's a violation of privacy.
Anything you do on the Internet, I want you to be able to do on MySpace. That's the goal and ambition.
It's our hope MySpace Comedy will serve as a launch pad for up-and-coming comedians and as an attraction for the biggest names in the industry.
Parents aren't clamoring for cell-phone companies to monitor their kids. Parents don't want to see what their kids are really like, but MySpace makes that really easy.
For most of our users, the vast majority of their MySpace friends are also offline friends. They're just connecting through a different medium when they're on MySpace.