New sites take aim at MySpace

MySpace, whose press representatives said executives were unavailable for interviews, has been continually adding features, including just recently a test version of an instant-messaging program and the hit TV show "24" as free and for-pay downloads.

Potential rivals insist they are doing more.

TagWorld Inc. and Freewebs Corp. let users build entire Web sites, not just single profile pages. Both see themselves as people's hubs for music, photos and video, while many MySpace users embed in their profile pages digital items stored elsewhere.

A Microsoft Corp. spinoff company, though mum on specifics, plans to launch Wallop later this year with promises of helping people better interact more like they would in the real world. (MSNBC.com is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

That's also the thinking behind CollectiveX.

"CollectiveX doesn't expand or create communities," founder Clarence Wooten said. "It empowers existing communities."

So members of pre-existing groups, such as a homeowners association, could use CollectiveX to communicate and meet one another — but only if someone they already know introduces them.

Groups are visible only to their members, and even within groups, a person's friends and colleagues are described only by title, not by name. By contrast, MySpace makes most profiles publicly viewable and users easily reachable.

Social networking goes niche
Meanwhile, some startups see MySpace as the new mass media — too big to appeal to any one demographic group well.

Adir Levy figures that once people get married, they're no longer keen on meeting new faces on MySpace, where about a quarter of the users are minors. So he developed Famoodle as a site for families to connect and expand existing relations.

"We definitely don't see us as becoming as big as MySpace, but we see ourselves as being the MySpace for the more mature crowd," said Levy, 25, who's getting married this year.

Others are targeting teens, the group that has turned MySpace into a lightning rod for warnings about the dangers posed by sexual predators on the Internet.

At Varsity World, moderators screen most writings, photos and other materials before posting. Tagged has features — among them, a weekly celebrity lookalike contest — likely to be seen as immature by even college students, said its founder, Greg Tseng.

"MySpace and the industry as a whole is really in the first inning," Tseng said.

MySpace's 80 million users is but a fraction of the estimated global online population of 1 billion.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said users also can have multiple profiles at multiple sites — the way they may belong to separate school, work, neighborhood and church networks in the offline world.

But not everyone will have time to keep up. In fact, only about 60 percent of MySpace's U.S. registered users visited the site in April, according to calculations of data from MySpace and Nielsen/NetRatings.

"You may have four or five e-mail addresses, but you use two of them," Sterling said. "You're going to go to one or two places. You're not going to go to four."

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