‘Tom is at work…workin’ on plans’ says the status bar of his MySpace page. Tom is good looking, smiley-faced, slightly creepy. A virtual maître d’, the nice-guy host that offers you his friendship from the first minute of your MySpace membership, along with some ‘helpful hints’ on how to use the site. More an emoticon than a representation of actual flesh and blood, his profile picture has become an iconic internet image (he is 9th on VH1’s Greatest Internet Superstars poll). His mood is set as ‘calm’. He is 31 years old, from Santa Monica, California. He currently has 197,533,987 friends, though he claims to want more, and he is one half of the double act that founded the third most popular website in the world. Or is he?

Until recently, the received wisdom has been that ‘President’ Tom, and his business partner ‘CEO’ Chris DeWolfe, set up MySpace as an ingenious joint venture- in the same vein as the Google boys did their revolutionary search engine. Many MySpace users believe in the attractive story of two twenty-somethings, working out of their bedrooms or from a garage and accidentally setting up an internet phenomenon, which has grown so famous that it has recently been bought up by Rupert Murdoch’s burgeoning News Corporation. The kind of dotcom ‘rags to riches’ success story that has become so familiar. Then, in September 2006, Valleywag (a Silicon Valley gossip blog) published an article by Trent Lapinski, which claimed that the whole Tom Anderson story was a PR stunt and that MySpace had actually been developed by a team of marketing gurus at a company called eUniverse.

‘Tom Anderson has served as an exceptionally convincing distraction’, said Trent, ‘the mascot designed to give the friendliest feel to a site created by a marketing company.

In interview Tom is vague about the early days of MySpace. He alludes to a group of other ‘guys and programmers’ who helped him set the site up and sticks to the line that the site was aimed at the creative community of actors, artists and musicians living in LA. He also suggests that his major in English and Rhetoric at Berkeley and his attendance at UCLAFilm School was a form of rebellion against his entrepreneurial father and claims that he was ‘planning to be a lifetime student’ when he met Chris De Wolfe. Which all sits well with the ‘nice guy who got lucky’ version of events and chimes nicely with the aspirations of MySpace’s target market.