Filed under: Google (GOOG), Apple Inc (AAPL), News Corp’B’ (NWS)

Back in the 1990s, I got to meet the folks at Geocities, a site that allowed anyone to create a website. The site was chaotic - but that was the attraction. However, after Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) bought the company, Geocities drifted into irrelevance.

Well, after the dot-com bust, we saw a new group of creative online platforms emerge. But this time, there was an interesting twist; that’s, users could connect with each other. It was an explosive idea, which catapulted some sites into the stratosphere.

Of course, one is MySpace. And, a top writer from the Wall Street Journal, Julia Angwin, has an excellent book on it, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America.

Launched in August 2003, MySpace was the brainchild of Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson (the site was nearly named “YoPeeps”). Both were part of a struggling dot-com, eUniverse (which was eventually renamed Intermix) and wanted to find the next huge idea. And they found it when they ran across Friendster, one of the first social networking sites.

So what to do? It was simple: copy it.