Stealing MySpace:
The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America
By: Julia Angwin
Published: Mar 17, 2009
ISBN: 9781400066940
Format: Hardcover, 371pp
Publisher: Random House Inc.
"The story of MySpace is a story of the first Hollywood Internet company, a company that is a breed apart from its Silicon Valley Brethren", writes Wall Street Journal Senior Technology Editot Julia Angwin in her important and highly entertaining new book Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. In this first indepth study of the internet powerhouse MySpace, the author takes the reader on a rollercoaster thrill ride through Hollywood, the corporate boardrooms of media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone, and into the the deepest reaches of internet business itself.
With writing more like a novel than a business book, Julia Angwin describes the meteoric rise of MySpace from humble beginnings to an internet sensation. Whether by design, or from programming mistakes that turned into into gold, the story of MySpace is a success story by any standard. At the same time as MySpace was on the way to becoming the most popular internet website, the clouds were already gathering on the web horizon. In a battle of egos as large as the world wide web itself, MySpace was in the corporate crosshairs as a takeover target. The author describes that high stakes boardroom swashbuckling in vivid detail.
Julia Angwin (photo left) recognizes that MySpace is a website like no other major location on the world wide web. Instead of sharing the technology and programming based roots of its competitors, MySpace evolved from the worlds of spyware, and the voyeurism of internet pornography. Not only does the book put the corporate egos and financial battles on display, but the author also delves into how the very culture of the internet was a root cause of the MySpace phenomenon. The MySpace story is not yet complete, as Julia Angwin points out. Competition is fierce, and online attention spans are notoriously short, often rendering today's success story into yesterday's news. The fate of future obscurity may still await MySpace.
For me, the power of the book is the brilliant writing and research that bring out the deeper stories in the MySpace saga. The book doesn't focus only on the MySpace company culture and its rise to prominence or the boardroom takeover battle. Julia Angwin also describes the very culture of the internet and of the MySpace users themselves, that led to the ascension of the company to prominence. That background information on the milieu, that gave MySpace its impetus, is crucial to understanding the explosion of MySpace onto the internet scene.
I highly recommend the ground breaking and absorbing Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin, to anyone seeking to understand the power of the internet and the importance of financial and creative control over key websites. Anyone interested in backroom business wheeling and dealing, involving some of the biggest names in media ownership, will discover how and why takeovers really happen.
Read the page turning Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin, and you will never look at internet business in the same way again. The book is an object lesson in how a site can rise to dominance, be acquired through intense bidding competition, and then find that very value in jeopardy. It's am internet business story not to be missed.
