The page was originally created by 29 year old Joe Anthony.  Anthony first created the site after hearing Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. After Obama officially announced his intent to run, his campaign worked with Jones in terms of providing content and sharing access to the friend list that now has 160,000 members. 

But in recent months, as the site exploded in popularity, the campaign became concerned about an outsider controlling the content and the responses going out under Senator Obama's name. As Anthony increased the time he was devoting to the page he eventually asked for compensation. The Obama campaign declined to pay the $39,000 Anthony proposed for his work on the site, along with additional fees of up to $10,000.

MySpace reluctantly stepped in to settle the dispute and decided that Senator Obama should have the rights to control the page.

"Apparently, the message here is, as an individual, if you have too big of an impact, you're just a liability. This is how Obama lost my vote, and one of his strongest supporters," Joe Anthony wrote on his personal blog on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the campaign is trying to rebuild Senator Obama's friends network from scratch.
The rights to the 160,000 person network were given to Anthony. As of this posting Senator Obama has just under 22,000 MySpace Friends, which leaves us asking how much exactly are MySpace "friends" worth?

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