What you may not know about MySpace

According to Trent Lapinski’s expose, MySpace was started by a company that specialized in spamming people. In fact, they didn’t get their start by being purely viral. Oh, that’s how they grow now, but they got started by spamming people. Trent seems to be obsessed with calling MySpace Spam 2.0, but even a less spam-obsessed source, Startup Review, has reached similar conclusions. I wondered then if any viral service can grow in a purely viral fashion, or must they all get some sort of jumpstart? I think jumpstarts are needed, but nowadays MySpace itself can fill that role; for example, 70% of YouTube’s traffic reportedly originates from MySpace. My point is, between MySpace and the blogosphere, there is no excuse to spam anyone anymore since a layer of machinery for getting the word out has already been built. Lastly, Trent writes that once Chris and Tom had figured out that they wanted to compete with Friendster, they got MySpace 1.0 built in just 10 days. Spam or no spam, that’s a lesson every startup can learn from.