What your favourite Web sites say about you

MYSPACE
What's the story?
Far from being an amateur effort developed in MySpace president Tom Anderson's garage, the site was a professional endeavour designed to overtake rival site Friendster. The initial project began in August 2003 and was overseen by Anderson, Brad Greenspan and Chris DeWolfe -- employees of eUniverse (later re-named Intermix Media).

According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is currently the sixth most popular English-language Web site -- it has attracted well over 100 million users to date. When parent company Intermix was acquired by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m (£290m) in July 2005, MySpace was valued at a handsome $327m (£160m), making the founders instant millionaires.

Did you know?
Intermix launched a huge marketing campaign and populated MySpace with a list of 20 million users and email subscribers it held separately. Alarm bells rang when the company was sued in 2005 by New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer for allegedly distributing Web toolbars that contained spyware. Some believe the list of users that helped populate MySpace was acquired by hidden spyware inside Intermix's Web toolbars. The case was settled out of court for $7.7m (£3.9m).

What MySpace says about you
The MySpace demographic varies from 11-year-old school children to 35 year olds who have never quite grown up. Strongly influenced by alternative music, they're united in their homemade haircuts, abhorrence of popular fashion and fondness for obscure electropunk. Typical MySpace users treat their profiles like a sandbox: a place where they can escape the real world, find themselves and make friends.

The users find salvation in badly animated GIFs, music that auto-plays their voices and taking 'sexy' camera phone profile portraits in front of dirty mirrors -- all common modes of expression. The number of friends in a user's list is a self-esteem barometer. Anyone will do, but their top five friends usually consist of anyone who's shunned pop culture, is partial to facial piercings and is in a grunge rock band.