Hemanshu Nigam: Mr. Safety for MySpace

Can CSO Hemanshu Nigam make MySpace a safe neighborhood, without also making it an empty one?

Law enforcement officers who have tested MySpace's response capabilities say it's not just lip service. "I was actually pleasantly surprised," says Deputy U.S. Marshal Robert Charette, who recently worked with MySpace to track down and arrest a man wanted in two states who was logging in to his MySpace account from a public library in Philadelphia. "We normally are used to waiting days and weeks on end [for subpoenaed information] from phone companies, and I expected a similar type of response from MySpace. But it was an immediate response, and they were extremely cooperative and a pleasure to deal with."

The fact is, the company had better be. MySpace is hot. Last July, according to the research service Hitwise, it passed Yahoo Mail to become the most-visited website in the United States. But as the number of profiles created at the Web community has exploded—to 150 million at the time of this writing, according to the company—so too has its appeal to everyone from small-time drug dealers to pedophiles to murderers. After all, it's just as easy for a criminal to sign up as it is for a 14-year-old who wants to share soccer photos or chat about Justin Timberlake.

The challenge for Nigam is to make the site a safer place for users (and, of course, advertisers) without destroying the very openness that has made it so popular. This places Nigam not just front and center at conferences about child safety, but also at the very nexus of culture, commerce and security. Despite MySpace's seeming ability to respond well when things go wrong, it's still far from certain whether Nigam can make the site measurably safer and more secure—and whether he can ever do enough to appease MySpace critics, including an outspoken group of 32 state attorneys general who want to tighten access to the site.

When Nigam took over last May, "there was a sigh of relief breathed by many folks [who felt] that now, at least, something is going to get done. There's an open door, and there's someone that they can communicate with," recalls Derek Broes, a senior vice president at Paramount Digital Entertainment, who worked with Nigam at two previous jobs. "His biggest challenge will be accomplishing what MySpace wants to accomplish without damaging the company itself and building a poor user experience."

It's no easy task. But as Broes puts it, echoing the sentiments of others who know Nigam, "if anybody is going to find the solution, it's going to be Hemu."