According to American Technology Research (backed by comScore data and via Om Malik), MySpace is now the second highest trafficked website, after Yahoo! (in page views).  It had 37 million unique visitors in February 2006, up fivefold from a year ago.  These are incredible numbers.  Om suggests that they may be the fastest growing property in internet history.

Mind you, this is not a rising tide story.  Much of this traffic came at the expense of incumbents like MSN and AOL.

MySpace is not the only high-growth story.  Google grew at 21%, and considering how big it is, it’s impressive.  Other winners were Blogger (a Google property), Citysearch and Wikipedia.

Do you remember the Yahoo! ads on TV?  How about Expedia’s TV ads?  The battle between Monster and HotJobs on SuperBowl circa 2000?…  The hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) strength of the high-growth properties of 2006 is that they do not depend on constant pull by advertising.  It’s the property’s natural draw that keeps them growing.

This huge advantage is what sets properties with strong social components apart, and will ensure their success.

All of a sudden, as Robert Young (on Om’s blog) points out:

…Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of MySpace is now widely-recognized as such a brilliant strategic move…

I recently read When Genius Failed, so I found it interesting that Ed Sim compares the current hubris at Google to what was going on at Long Term Capital Management in 1998.

I was having lunch with a friend recently who was telling me about some
of his dealings with Google over the last year.  As an ex-Wall Street
guy, it struck him that some of the meetings he had with Google were
like the ones he had at Long Term Capital years ago.  Even when LTC was
about to crater, he remembers going to their offices, being sequestered
into an off-campus conference room, and not being able to get any
information out of them to even help bail them out.  In addition,
people would show up and leave during the meeting, take notes, and not
even introduce themselves.  Well, it turns out that his meetings with
Google over the last year were pretty similar.
…
There are other parallels-Google has an appetite for hiring PhDs. is
driven by an incredible proprietary algorithm, and is by far the best
web company on the street and performing like a rock star.  Like LTC,
the bigger and bigger Google gets, the harder it will be for them to
drive significant percentage based growth.  In addition, the culture,
since it is one driven by engineers, can also be driven by a NIH or not
invented here syndrome.  Ultimately, since history always does repeat
itself, I hope that Google understands that self-confidence is
imperative but hubris and arrogance can kill.

Auren has a provocative post on the digital footprint one creates while communicating:  your blog posts, emails, IMs, etc.  He contends:

Question: with the thousands of
letters he wrote, could we recreate Thomas Jefferson? Maybe.

Now look at
people that blog often and write lots of emails. Could we recreate them? More likely. Especially bloggers like Danah Boyd that
really inject their personality into their blogs. Even more importantly, save your IMs as they
might really reveal your personality.

Some time ago, Baris speculated that one’s financial records also served as an insightful mirror of one’s life.  His point was:

First and foremost, pictures and videos mainly capture notable events, as such they are snapshot of ones life. Your financials capture your routines, what you do over and over again, in a continuous way. It is not the one off events that define you, it is your routines, things you do over and over again. Emails
are good too, but unlike financials that focus on specific events,
email are inefficient since one sends so many of them, hard to get to
the essence of your life through email.

Microsoft
Money would capture, where you worked, how much you made, how your
salary grew over time, when you got a big bonus, what you spent it on,
where you lived, what you did for vacation, where you went on vacation,
what hobbies you spent your money, what school you sent your children
and what activities they did there. Since most transactions you enter in the system has a memo field, you can enter a little blurb about the transaction. So, in my case, every time I go to dinner I write down who I went with. It even keeps track of your social life.

I agree with both Baris and Auren.  However, my nomination for the best representation of who I am and what I think about would be my clickstream.  It’s the idea behind Root.net’s /Vaults.

WSJ reports on jittery advertisers whose ads are being displayed next to risque content on platforms like MySpace and AOL, via ad aggregators and advertising networks such as Advertising.com.  Some examples are:

Last month, Verizon Communications Inc. was surprised to find one of its Internet ads on a MySpace.com page with photos of scantily clad women. Walt Disney Co. was unaware that its ad was next to an article about male sexual performance on About.com. Jobs Web site Monster.com
didn’t realize its spot was on a site that appeared to be offering
unauthorized downloads of copyrighted music and videos. Once they found
out, all three yanked their ads.

My guess is that we’ll see less and less of this type of complaint as companies eventually learn that the association between editorial and advertising content is not as strong on the internet as TV and print.  If a TV set is tuned to ESPN at a strip club, and you see an ad on TV for Toyota, you don’t think of Toyota as sponsoring (or condoning) strip clubs. (I am not suggesting that this will happen very quickly, though.)

The ad networks are making advertising (or getting attention) more efficient, so they will increase in volume.  It’s fun to see old media (read: WSJ in this case) take jabs at the forces looking to eat its lunch.

danah boyd was on O’Reilly Factor last week (do watch the interview – there are a few funny comments).  Bill O’Reilly is as conservative as mainstream TV gets.  Fox News, in its generalized worldview, could be categorized as pro moralist censorship.  It’s interesting to observe how they are dealing with MySpace, now a News Corp. property.

Baris posted about this ranking of Web2.0 companies by a SEO outfit called SEOmoz.  I am not clear what the criteria was, but it seems like their picks would get a general nod in the space.  However, the big misses for me in their list are del.icio.us, down in third place, and Indeed and SimplyHired missing. Baris is surprised about Riya missing.

Further blurring the line between the living room TV set and the PC, and helping establish that how a bit enters your home is irrelevant, six major studios are beginning to offer movie downloads.

Starting today, nearly 300 films will go on sale through Movielink,
which until now has been largely an online rental site.

…

Another
movie site, CinemaNow, will start selling downloadable versions of
about 75 movies from Sony, MGM and Lions Gate, which owns a large stake
in CinemaNow. Curt Marvis, the chief executive of CinemaNow, said he
was talking to other studios about selling downloads.

Nick Carr’s post alerted me to a purge going on at MySpace (reported by FT). 

MySpace, a division of media giant News Corp, has kicked some 200,000 "friends" off the site for posting objectionable material:

Ross Levinsohn, head of News Corp’s internet division,
said some of the material taken down contained “hate speech”. Some of
it, he said, was “too risqué”. “It’s a problem that’s endemic to the
internet – not just MySpace,” Mr Levinsohn said. “The site, in the last
two months, I think has become safer.”

Notwithstanding the operations challenge of policing such vast landscape, this move will act as a good test of the users’ perception of MySpace.  All of a sudden, the closed room where the youth goes to escape from authority (parents, teachers…), the authority is making its presence felt.  I doubt MySpace would have made such a move as an independent company.  The liability-conscious News Corp cannot face some of the risks that Intermix could have.

This fact can mean an inherent advantage for some of the scrappier independent platforms down the line.

From now on, everytime I hear a pitch for a new website/webservice, I’ll check it against Scott Heiferman’s "50 Reasons Why More People Aren’t Using Your Website".