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You can listen to the worthless pieces of sh1t here posting rants or you can look at the data. One is factual and the other is not.

The website had many regular users that did not work for Fox Media. Most of the users were not Fox media employees.

Again you can use this data to scale up to MySpace, and you can see why people stopped using the website after X amount of time. The data more or less shows what drove the user fatigue.

That's the kind of data that is priceless and that you can't get with any other data set.

@PaoloM: I heard that the author knows former executives at MySpace and had breakfast with them at Dennys near the LAX airport as recently as last month.

I heard that the author had a legion of MySpace employees flood the website when they were considering legal action for copyright infringement. This included MySpace developers, moderators and more. They later disclosed themselves as Fox Media employees, but did not leave the website and continued to monitor it.

If you are not interested in purchasing the access to the data for the purposes of due dilligence priort to an acquisition, then you need to let others that are interested have the way. Otherwise you are just being destructive.

pretty sure the author knows people at MySpace including former execs. This was totally directed at possible acquirers that got the promotional documents from Fox Media, not the company itself.

@giovanni:

I really don't see how this should affect a website hosted on a single server so drammatically.

Assuming you missed the whole cloud computing shift these past 3 years, I guess that would be correct. Even small companies want on demand scalability now that mainstream America told them how cheap and easy it is.

So the point of this thread is now, tell your boss at X large company that there is some data that can be used for predictive analysis. Tell them its cheap compared to the price of acquisition and tell them you know how to get it. They will tell their boss, and somewhere down the line karma will visit you.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-17/aol-sells-bebo-to-criterion-for-less-than-10-million-update3-.html

AOL lost 1+ billion dollars on the Bebo Acquisition. Had somebody collected a sample of Bebo users on a website similar to Bebo, and had AOL lawyers bought a dump of that anonymized data before the purchase, they could have averted a castrophe that cost shareholders more than ONE BILLION dollars.

That opportunity is knocking for this MySpace acquisition right now. Take your hands off your ears and listen.

June 17 (Bloomberg) -- AOL Inc., the Internet company spun off from Time Warner Inc., sold its Bebo social-networking service to Criterion Capital Partners LLC for less than 2 percent of what it paid for the site two years ago.

Do you want this to be you?

@PaoloM:

what my dinky roleplaying website was doing every two months in 1996

Your dinky roleplaying website didn't have myspace members or the myspace programmers or founders as members. It also doesn't have some of the most high traffic profile members from MySpace such as Tila Tequila as members.

The data from your dinky roleplaying website would be useless in a MySpace acquisition dilligence process.

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20051013064856/http://www.sitespaces.net/

The author of this website has hard data with traffic coming directly from MySpace and rolling over their data to this website, then using the website as if they were on MySpace.

This data can be used to gauge whether it's worth buying from NewsCorp or not. Period. This is a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions.

If an acquisition team wants to go without analysis of this data, then fine, but the price is tiny compared to what your company may lose if you don't look at it first. It would be a shame if an acquisition mistake was made leading to a multi-million dollar loss and the knowledge of the existence of 3rd party dilligence data was later made known to x purchasing company's investors.

@Ray7:

Don't you think it's a bit hypocritical to rubbish Microsoft then use their website to advertise your shady equivalent of a crack deal in a car park?

Was this an actual question? Because my answer is no.

Well, just in case there is a lawyer that wants to investigate, the data contains

1. thousands of members who migrated profile information from the MySpace website in the same exact format
2. site navigation data, entrance data, exit data, profile statistics, page views, what they clicked on, on the page, how long they stared at something ect... can all be extracted from the data.
3. Google had an ad deal with MySpace for several years, but the analytics data from those advertisements does not include the behavioral data that is included in a full SQL dump.
4. The data contains about close to a million visits over close to 3 years by thousands of people.
5. Unlike Facebook data or data from other social networks, this data is truly representational of the MySpace demographic, and can be potentially scaled up mathmatically to have a data based view of MySpace before an acquisition.
6. Total data volume in the terabyte range
7. The data is a full SQL dump, static file assets, and source code for MySpace acquisition accessment only. No data can be retained by the purchaser after a due dilligence analysis has been made.
8. Personally identifiable information is stripped before it's handed over to any auditing agency for analysis. So people's first and last names, the last 3 digits of ip addresses, email addresses, ect... are removed and or obfuscated as well as any other personal data such as messages.

 I contacted the owner of the data, and he told me this. You can contact him or her directly if you have any interest in doing your job and making sure your MySpace acquisition offer is appropriate or not.

contact: myspacehomework36@yahoo.com

for more information and a friendly price quote based on your consumption needs.

@blowdart: Perhaps you should have read past the first sentence then.

At any rate, it would appear that the companies that NewsCorp sent the buyout offer to have little to go on to do any due dilligence.

Most of the members of Sitespaces were in fact MySpace members including several of the programmers at the company and one of the founders, so I've heard. Even Tila Tequila and other famous MySpace people were members of SiteSpaces before it closed.

Who would buy such a website without knowing what they're getting into?

I bet the author of SiteSpaces still has a backup of the data, and I bet a lawyer doing due dilligence on a MySpace acquisition can buy access for dilligence purposes only privately.

If it were the case that they were to access such data, they could possibly see what the pageview rate on a website like that is per visit accurately, and not from a 3rd party. See what the eCPM is, and get a feel for usage trends. In essence they could see what a test bed for the real thing looks like from a data perspective.

A passing thought...

@blowdart:

not purchased whilst it was already on the platform/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kten

He developed Orkut.com as a 20% independent project while working at Google. In late June 2004, Affinity Engines filed suit against Google, claiming that Büyükkökten and Google based Orkut.com on code for InCircle, an application intended for university alumni groups. The allegation is based on the alleged presence of nine identical bugs in Orkut.com and in InCircle.

I heard that MS transplants helped on this before they moved it to South America.

Dead link

This bulletin board software added a space at the end of the uri

http://twitter.com/vicgundotra

I think I just removed it.