The curse of MySpace: will Twitter be next?
Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, logged-out half its employees and announced, ‘big changes ahead’, causing many loyal users of the 16-year-old site to see it as a time to exit for pastures new.
Will Twitter now follow in the demise of Friends Reunited, Msn Messenger, Beebo and the other great social tech grandads? We don’t know the answer, but it does give us a brilliant excuse to reflect on the man to the left ← and below↓. Who remembers his name?
Yes, of course – it’s MySpace Tom! Everyone’s first and most loyal ‘friend’, the MySpace co-founder was the reassuring face that ensured you weren’t a total Billy no-mates when starting your profile. Now, whatever happened to MySpace? Well, technically it’s still alive, but in no recognisable shape or form, let’s look back at the first ever social media platform that really opened up our tiny weeny worlds.
Good times
It’s 2004 and in bursts MySpace, suddenly giving us the possibility to connect with other humans like never before.
A social media platform that enabled users to create their own profile pages, engage in forums, listen to new bands, and meet millions of other like-minded people. There was a whole dedicated section to music and users could listen and share songs.
Joining was easy. First job, create a unique fictious username (♥{[DEbss ♥’z JAmez]}♥), then unleash your personality on the 100% customisable profile page. To really express yourself, a YouTube lesson in html was needed. Then you could add flashing graphics to the background, change the font to bright fuchsia pink and pick a song that would assault anyone on their arrival. Hours would be lost to pimping up your page. These were pre-filter days, so the best you could do to make your photos more attractive was to use the ‘lighten tool’ and fade down your face until it no longer properly existed.
Apart from connecting with friends, you could follow official accounts – mainly of musicians – and get to send messages to famous people you fancied. It was loud, proud, unashamedly narcissistic and like nothing we’d ever seen before.
When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. bought the site for $580 million in July 2005, all signs pointed to a bright future. In 2006, the site had more than 22 million users and was valued at $12 billion.So, where did it all go wrong?
Bad times
Safety measures in the early days of the internet were at the best, basic. Thousands of registered sex offenders were found to be lurking and after a string of lawsuits, MySpace’s reputation was in tatters. Alongside that, the site was riddled by annoying bugs and plastered with dodgy-looking advertising. Suddenly, things weren’t looking quite as rosy.
Then in 2006, along came clean-cut Facebook. 24-year-old owner, Mark Zuckerberg even offered to buy his cracks-showing rivals out for $75 million, but they turned him down. And if you now can’t remember if Justin Timberlake buying MySpace is an urban myth or not – it wasn’t. And he did. In 2011 Mr JT picked up the site from News Corp for $35 million. After a big rebranding exercise, they tried to make it more niche to music users and launched by releasing a new single by Timberlake, but it just never got its mojo back.
Changing hands several times since, there’s been several more low points, including losing 12 years’ worth of content in a server migration disaster, and now Myspace (note lower ‘s’) is alive, and still slightly kicking, as a curated music and entertainment site that is more aimed at putting ‘proper’ musicians in touch with each other rather than random goth teenagers. RIP, we miss you MySpace.
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