Lapinski, a 20-year-old blogger and journalism student, has been investigating MySpace since July 2005. He said MySpace's initial popularity came not from word-of-mouth, as is often assumed, but from an intense e-mail campaign. He describes the current MySpace as more of a marketing tool than a social-networking site. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES


Mark Brooks: Bebo is the U.K.'s top social network and was similarly seeded from the Founder's prior company BirthdayAlarm.com. Friendster was grown from the Founders golden database of Bay Area contacts who were initially given exclusive entry to the site to help jonathan build and refine the site.