I'm hardly the target demographic for MySpace.com, but Jupiter Research is raising questions about it that have crossed my mind as well - how much of the supposedly huge community there is real?

"Certainly there are a large amount of people spending a large amount of time on this site," said Nate Elliot, an analyst for Jupiter Research. "When you look at the huge numbers they throw out there -- 50 [million], 60 million registered users -- those are a mirage."

Elliot admits that the site generates a lot of activity, and that it may indeed have tens of millions of registered users, but those numbers can be deceptive and only tell part of the story.

"They're promoting the number that is most advantageous for them to promote, but the simple fact is that only a fraction of the registered users ever go back," said Elliot. "And only a fraction of them use the site on any kind of regular basis, and then another fraction of them are responsible for the traffic."

It could be a lot like Blogger - filled to the brim with splogs, with the serious users migrating off the site once they realize that they are serious users. Free services tend to get filled with opportunistic spammers - email is simply the best example.