Everyone’s at Home at MySpace.com

Imagine being able to share your living room with your high school and college friends, family members, business associates, and potential mates. You could chat whenever you wanted, sharing pictures, videos, and ideas-even if these folks are scattered throughout the country. Sound like a great plan? To many, the answer is yes. Everyone’s home at MySpace.com, and you can learn how to become a part of their community.

The company’s website, MySpace.com, touts itself as “a place for friends.” It asks you to consider whether you really are “six people away from Kevin Bacon.” The website is free and open to everyone, including friends who want to chat online; single people who wish to meet other single people; do-it-at-home matchmakers who want to match their friends up with other friends; families who wish to stay in contact; business people who want to network with other business people; classmates and students looking for potential study partners; and anyone looking for long-lost friends. Certainly, you must have found yourself in one of those categories-thereby making you a perfect candidate for MySpace.com!

Known as a social networking website, MySpace.com has become the fourth most popular English-language website on the Internet and the third most popular website in the United States. The company is headquartered in Santa Monica, California, is owned by News Corporation, and employs roughly 300 staff members. The 106 millionth MySpace.com account was opened on September 8, 2006, and the website reportedly achieves upwards of 230,000 new registrations per day. Now that’s popularity!

So, what exactly can you do by making a home at MySpace.com? The website provides you with an interactive network of friends, which you set up, personal profiles, videos, music, chat groups, and blogs. It also has its own internal search engine and an internal email system.

In addition to being home to your high friends, family members from Kentucky, and your fellow kindergarten teachers, MySpace.com is also home to a large variety of filmmakers, comedians, musicians, and other little- and well-known celebrities. These artists upload their short films, songs, and other productions directly into their MySpace.com profile. Not surprisingly, having celebrities call MySpace.com home has added much to the website’s growing appeal.

So, how do you sign up, you ask? It’s simple, according to the website’s instructions. Your first step is to sign up and create a profile by visiting the MySpace.com website. Your profile becomes your home on the web, where you describe yourself: your interests, occupation, hobbies, etc. You can also upload pictures and keep a journal here. Next, you invite your friends to join your own personal network. You can also search MySpace.com’s website to find friends who are already members are MySpace.com. Once you’ve set up your network of friends, you can view the connections you’ve created between your friends and your friends’ friends. Amazingly, some people find upwards of 1,000 people in their extended MySpace.com network. Finally, it’s time to meet those folks in your extended network. You can suggest matches and communicate with anyone in your network.

It is important to note that being a member of MySpace.com is almost but not quite like being at home. In fact, one of its major criticisms is that the distance afforded by the Internet emboldens members to share too much of themselves. The website has been caught up in controversies involving minor children involvement, indecency, and privacy. The company’s privacy policy attends to all of these issues but seems to have difficulty enforcing the rules. Teenagers have found ways around the minimum 14-year-old registration age and profile identity theft is reportedly fairly common. As with any place where you share personal information about yourself, think and act wisely before and when you decide to come home at MySpace.com