Imeem site puts musical spin on social networking

SAN FRANCISCO -- Dalton Caldwell graduated from Stanford with the same ambition as many Stanford students: to create a popular website.

It worked famously for Google's founders, and it clicked for Caldwell as well. His social media site, Imeem, attracts 20 million users every month. Each day, 65,000 new people visit the site, which Caldwell, now 27, founded in 2003.

Imeem is like Facebook or MySpace in that members are encouraged to create personal pages with information about themselves. But since it is a social media site, these pages are focused on artists and albums, with personally created playlists featuring either single- or multiartist mixes.

Creating playlists is easy. You type in the name of an artist or a song, and a page pops up with related media: individual songs, playlists created by others, even photos or animations created by other members. Click the "playlist" tab, name your playlist ...