By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic

Is this how the world ends: Not with a bang or a whimper, but with the digital world divided between Facebook and MySpace devotees?  Or maybe I hear the "tweet, tweet, tweet" of the Twitter folks.  Or maybe everybody will be on every social network with plenty of time on their hands as the nation stops making things and sheds jobs at an increasingly rising rate. But I digress.
 
Julia Angwin, an award-winning reporter at The Wall Street Journal, tells the story of the development of MySpace in a fly-on-the-wall book called "Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America" (Random House, 384 pages, notes, index, photos, $27.00).  Angwin's newspaper is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which became the owner of MySpace in 2005 for a price reportedly just south of $1 billion. 
 
        That's not bad for a website started just two years before by Californians Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, marketing executives, not techies, at their company called eUniverse, which sold wrinkle creams and ink cartridges.  The pair copied features of what became MySpace from an earlier site called Friendster. Users flocked to MySpace because they were allowed unparalleled freedom to customize their pages every which way but loose and use fake identities. 
 
        Angwin herself summarizes her book better than any reviewer, so I'll let her do the talking: 
 
        "Porn. Hacking. Spyware. Spam. Spy cameras you can hide in your shoe. 
 
        "Prior to launching MySpace, the founders [DeWolfe and Anderson] dabbled in all of the above. Relentless marketers and knockoff artists, their story also included a boardroom coup, broken friendships, betrayals, litigation, and a pair of feuding media moguls--Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch. 
 
        "When I stumbled on the history of MySpace, I quickly realized it was not your typical Silicon Valley saga.  There were no computer geniuses dropping out of prestigious universities, no fancy algorithms, no computers in garages.  In short: The MySpace tale was manna from journalistic heaven; I had to write it. 
 
        "It was also a serious lesson about the evolution of the Internet.  The success of these ragtag marketers from Los Angeles demonstrated an important change in our culture: Technology had finally become relatively easy to use.  Innovation was no longer confined to the digital elites.  MySpace's success was largely due to the fact that it put its customers first, and technology second.
 
  "Still, as it grew, MySpace's lack of tech savvy has been its Achilles Heel.  Today, MySpace is being forced to play technological catch-up to rival social networking site, Facebook, and it's not clear if it will succeed. 
          "The final chapter of the MySpace story has not yet been written.  But the unlikely tale of how MySpace was born is one that begged to be told."
 
* * * 
 
        Coming as it did after the 2000-2001 collapse of the high-tech boom, the creation of MySpace is indeed remarkable.  The site displays more than 40 billion web page views per month and generates nearly $1 billion a year for Murdoch's online empire. 
 
        The "Stealing" part of the title refers to the battle between Murdoch and the combative Viacom (CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, Paramount Pictures, etc) CEO Sumner Redstone, a battle which they don't care what it costs.  Australian Murdoch won as he outmaneuvered Redstone to buy MySpace. 
 
        In an epilogue, Angwin brings us up to date on what happened to the players in the MySpace story. Anderson and DeWolfe continue to run MySpace out of the News Corp. interactive media office in Beverly Hills.  Anderson interacts with users while DeWolfe runs the business side and "puts a lot of effort into improving relations with Silicon Valley. 
 
        Angwin says the two marketing geniuses have succeeded in fending off Facebook, which--as of April 2008--remains about half the size of MySpace, with about 35 million monthly visitors compared with the 72 million on MySpace. 
 
        Murdoch, she writes, "remains focused on the Internet as the future of News Corp."  That's a big concession to reality from a dedicated print newsman like Murdoch.  He has called MySpace the "digital centerpiece" of his company and has predicted that MySpace could fetch more than $6 billion in the unlikely event that it is sold.  "This will be the biggest single mass platform for advertising in the world," Murdoch has predicted. 
 
        If you enjoyed Byran Burrough's "Barbarians at the Gate" and Michael Lewis's "The New New Thing," "Stealing MySpace" is the book for you.  Given the ongoing meltdown of the print news industry, it might be the book for all of us. 
 
        Publisher's website: www.atrandom.com