Stories From The Tell-All MySpace Book

Wall Street Journal editor Julia Angwin?s tell-all book about MySpace is set for official publication on March 17, 2009. We've got our hands on a draft of the 268 page book. Some of the more interesting stories are below (you can pre-order it here).

The book, which is really being published a year too late, goes into excruciating detail about the history of MySpace, its founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, and others involved in the business. Most of the details are already public knowledge, but there are a handful of facts that I didn't previously know about. Or mere rumors that Angwin presents as facts.

MySpace is quick to point out that they had no involvement in the book at all. All they're officially saying is "This book received zero participation, zero access, and zero fact-checking from MySpace." It's clear from the tone of the book that Angwin's sources are primarily or solely people who've left the company, many of whom have a bone to pick with MySpace or parent company News Corp.

The first half of the book highlights some of the shady practices of the MySpace founders in the early days. The site launched at 5:37 p.m. on August 15, 2003 on a lark - DeWolfe was looking for a new business to replace revenue from ResponseBase, an advertising company that is alternately described as peddling spyware and spam. The original idea was to copy Friendster but let users create any online persona they chose (Friendster was deleting fake profiles as fast as they could). That freedom, combined with reasonable load times on MySpace (1-2 seconds v. 20 seconds for Friendster), allowed the nascent site to get a foothold that it is yet to relinquish. These days, Friendster has been pushed to Asia and has little U.S. presence.

Tom Anderson's real age and youthful hacker activities are well documented in the book. Anguin talks about an obsession Anderson had with "an attractive Asian-American in the finance department" that led to a request that Anderson work from home for months. She also says Anderson was involved in an Asian-focused porn site even after MySpace was acquired by News Corp., a potential PR nightmare, but that Rupert Murdoch (CEO) and Peter Chernin (COO) brushed aside concerns and swept the incident under the rug.

Dewolfe is portrayed as a charismatic big picture executive who focused on growth and keeping MySpace in the Hollywood limelight. He made a crucial mistake in 2003 to start MySpace as an internal project for the company he worked for, Intermix, which cost him tens of millions of dollars down the road. But he was able to create significant independence for MySpace and the team within Intermix, including having separate offices in Santa Monica and a separate board of directors. He is portrayed as fiercely independent and unmanageable, mowing through four bosses since launching MySpace. Greenspan, Rosenblatt and Ross Levinsohn all eventually left eUniverse/Intermix/FIM. Peter Levinsohn, his current boss, has managed to keep his job.

The MySpace corporate structure prior to its 2005 acquisition by News Corp. is described in detail. Ross Levinsohn, the former President of Fox Interactive Media, is given most of the credit for identifying and closing the deal from News Corp.'s side. A key part of the story is how little DeWolfe and Anderson made from that sale. The story tracks back to 2003 when they (along with other execs like Josh Berman) were owed a few hundred thousand dollars from parent company eUniverse for an earnout in connection with the earlier acquisition of ResponseBase. In the hope of getting those dollars, the team didn't leave to start MySpace as a new startup. Instead, they launched it within a company they owned very little of. That decision would cost them tens of millions of dollars in 2005.

One of the most interesting stories, however, is a report that MySpace could have acquired Facebook for just $75 million in early 2004, but passed on the deal as too expensive.

Other key tidbits from the book:

Tom Anderson didn't sign up for MySpace until September 2, 2003, more than two weeks after it launched.

A key competitive advantage of MySpace in the early days, the ability for users to change the html of the site, was originally a mistake. When execs saw how much people liked to fully personalize the site, they left it alone.

eUniverse founder Brad Greenspan's alleged follies and unbalanced personality are well documented, particularly his ouster by the board of directors in late 2003. Greenspan has launched a litany of unsuccessful lawsuits against various parties in the years since then.