The New Wisdom of the Web

It's not an audience, it's a community. Many adults heard about MySpace for the first time last year, when Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. paid $580 million to buy the company--a figure that raised some eyebrows, but now seems like the bargain of the young century. Simply by word of mouth, it is spreading through the youth world like head lice at a kindergarten. Just last Monday the site had its biggest day, signing up 270,000 new members, the rough equivalent of adding all the residents of St. Paul, Minn. "Every Monday it usually goes up," says its nonchalant cofounder Anderson, who just turned 30. "Talk to me any Monday and we have probably set a new record." One of these Mondays, he expects MySpace to pass Yahoo as the traffic leader on the entire Web.

Before MySpace, a lot of people thought that "social computing"--Web sites built to benefit from connections between participants--was a hot area, but Anderson and DeWolfe understood first that people, especially younger people who grew up with a mouse in hand, would get more out of it if they could express themselves by putting all their information where friends could see it. So they concentrated on building a site that easily allowed users to create their own little online treehouses, adding photos, videos, music and blogs. Then the users can build their network of friends--everyone gets Tom Anderson as their first--and some wind up with thousands. MySpace in the 2000s is what the malt shop was in the 1950s--if the malt shop could hold 65 million adolescents, many of whom had no qualms about showing pictures of themselves half drunk in their underwear.

Before the Living Web, celebrities trying to get access to media had to cope with editors, television bookers and program di-rectors. Now musicians, celebrities and fame wanna-bes start their own MySpace pages to get close to audiences (in early: R.E.M., Tommy Lee, Nine Inch Nails). For comedians the road to stardom used to begin on Johnny Carson's couch. But when a fairly obscure comic named Dane Cook fanatically began grooming the MySpace page he began in December 2003--approving every "be my friend" request until his network approached a million friends, and relentlessly plugging his CDs and appearances on his page--his career took off. He's hosted "Saturday Night Live," cut an HBO deal and has a hit album. "That [success] tends to get attributed to MySpace," boasts Anderson. "All the comics are superpumped to be the next Dane Cook." Bye-bye, Johnny, Jay and Dave. Heeeeeere's collective intelligence.

MySpace has spawned a growing list of imitators. Fastest rising is Facebook, created by Harvard sophomore (now dropout) Mark Zuckerberg, who began the site as a casual way to help his Harvard classmates keep in touch. Within weeks more than half the student body had signed up. Now Facebook has 7 million users at 2,000 schools blogging to each other, connecting friends and posting pictures of last night's party. Zuckerberg, 21, hopes that MySpace kids will graduate to his site. Other companies plan to circle around MySpace like pilot fish. "Our goal is to build instant messaging for power users of other social media," says Dalton Caldwell, the 27-year-old cofounder of iMeem. Even headier competition lies ahead. Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that he doesn't understand why people think his company wants to be the next Microsoft. "Everybody thinks we're building operating systems, PCs and browsers. They clearly don't get it," he says. So where does Google want to go? "Look at MySpace," he says cryptically. "Very interesting."

But while MySpace is preparing to pass Yahoo as the No. 1 site, one of Yahoo's recent purchases still stands as the paragon of companies hoping to accelerate into Living Web stardom. That's Flickr, the photo-sharing site created by Vancouver philosophy major Butterfield and dot-com vet Fake. At its first release two years ago, Flickr is in some ways the ultimate user-centric site--its customers even helped shape the direction of the company as it moved from an online game to an instant-messaging service with pictures to what it is now--a way for people to upload their photos and share them with the entire community of users. This small shift from previous online photo sites, which stored your pictures in the hope that you'd order prints, changed everything. What was once the digital equivalent of a shoe box became a vibrant community built around photos and a vast collaborative effort to produce an infinite scrapbook.

"We were very small and very poor," says Fake, "so we built a lot of features that were deliberately viral." A big boost came from bloggers, who appreciated that Flickr had a one-button command to "blog this," and a photo would instantly appear on their site, hot-linked to the shot's real home on Flickr. They also made sure that their site worked well with other Living Web applications--Flickr photos are one of the prime ingredients in Web mash-ups. After Fake and Butterfield saw del.icio.us, they added tagging, and that proved to be a way to let the community organize millions of photos in a useful and sometimes provocative way. Because tagging is so flexible, when others see interesting tags they sometimes apply them to their own photos or even try to take pictures that will fit those categories. For instance, the existence of a Flickr tag "squared circle" leads members to look for such patterns in their surroundings, and take pictures when they perceive them. Users will often form "groups" to share their art (in this case, "squared circle," now with 3,500 members and more than 26,000 pics).