Social networking sites are part of the reason the Web 2.0 bubble is continuing to grow. By nature these sites are driven by user generate data and content and are showing new trends in exactly what people want to see, read and watch on the internet. The two front runners in this are digg.com and MySpace.com.

Digg is a site that is, more or less, news that the consumer wants to read and find interesting. Stories get to the front page of the site by users �digging� them and thus making them more popular and pushing them out front. The goal is simple, put interesting stuff that people actually want to read on the front of a website, not what some editor thinks may sell ad space or attract visitors. MySpace on the other hand is a beast unto itself. It took over where Friendster.com started to fail and is now such a large part of the internet culture, people are creating pages for their dogs, businesses and just about everything else.

The problem with MySpace is that they are still barely making any money, as is the case with most Web 2.0 companies. They were acquired in 2005 for what seems to be a bargain price of $580 million (compared to Google’s acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion), so there is no more real selling that is going to go on, they need to start generating income. There are hundreds of pages on the internet to customize your MySpace page and a good number of these are to help hide the advertisements, along with making your page extremely annoying to look at.

Today for more then two hours, MySpace codes stopped working. They banned certain HTML tags like iframe sometime ago to prevent people from loading their own content over the ads and what MySpace hopes you will see and click. New widgets flash and some HTML code just stopped working. Editing your own profile could cause it to become flawed. What does this all mean? There is a possibility that we will start to see some changes to the site to restrict just how much you can customize. If you are on MySpace, I’m sure you get the messages from Tom now and again that he will not be charging for MySpace nor will he be taking the site down. Maybe not, but using it in the manor you have become accustomed to may change, and not for the better.

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