3pointD.com

Glitchy points out this Forbes magazine story about the cottage industry that’s sprung up on the periphery of MySpace, with people offering to help MySpace users trick out their profiles or giving them tools that let them automate tasks like inviting, accepting and contacting new friends.

Louis Ramos, a freshman at Southern Illinois University, says he has made more than $200,000 since last June by running Pimpmyspace.com [that’s a Forbes typo; it should be Pimpmyspace.org] and Myspaceeditor.org, two Web sites that offer MySpace users free tools to upgrade and spruce up their profiles with colors and images.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns MySpace, apparently sees such services as parasitic; several people who run them say they’ve gotten cease and desist letters from the huge media company. What surprises me is that the person at News Corp. who was savvy enough to push the MySpace purchase through doesn’t also realize that services like these do a lot to make their product stickier. But this kind of thing will change, I suppose, once the 3pointD generation gains the executive suite.