Do you remember Myspace? If so, keep reading to reminisce with us. And if you’re too young to remember, here are some of the things that you missed out on.
1. Your Top Friends
Today’s social media apps use several algorithms—including ones to determine who your closest friends are, and who you regularly interact with. But with Myspace, you could manually set your friends list. As you may be guessing, this destroyed as many friendships as it strengthened.
Over time, the limit for your top friends grew from five to eight. Which, as you can imagine, led to some interesting discussions at school.
2. Picking a Profile Theme
While social platforms let you customize your profiles in several ways, Myspace was something of a pioneer in this respect. You could set a theme for your profile, which included changing the font and background.
With Myspace, you could let your personality shine through. If you felt more edgy, for example, you could give your profile a darker look. The end result was something unique, and that you could truly make your own.
3. Picking Music for Your Profile
Were you one of those people that always had a “theme song”? Well, back in the day, you could set a song to play on your profile whenever anyone else visited it.
The user had media controls so they could stop the song, or even play something else if they wanted to—but it was still pretty cool. It was another touch of personalization, like when you go into a store or restaurant that always has a certain music station on.
If you’ve been onto Myspace since its decline, then you know that—for whatever reason—this feature has managed to hang on since the platform’s glory days. So, if you’re feeling super nostalgic, why not go back into your old profile and update this (if you can remember your login details)?
4. HTML Editing
Okay, so you could pick friends, themes, and music on your Myspace profile. But is that it?
Well, no. Not quite. If you were really tech-savvy back in the day, you could change the basic web mechanics of your profile page using HTML editing.
Most people never used this feature, and most of the people that did never used it well. But if you could pull it off, you would feel like a boss—and your profile would resemble this. Since programming skills are more accessible today, it’d be interesting to see what social media would look like today if networking sites had this feature.
5. Trying to Unfriend Tom
Myspace let you “connect” with anyone. And even if they didn’t have to connect back, they would show up on your connections list. While your friends wouldn’t believe that you had some kind of internet friendship with Dane Cook, it was somewhat a prerequisite to following celebrities on Instagram and Twitter.
One person that many people chose not to stay connected with, however, was Tom Anderson—the co-creator and later president of the platform—who was everyone’s first friend.
Many users tried to unfriend Anderson—also known as “Myspace Tom”—straight away. If we had known how much clout likes and follower counts would give us on social media platforms in the future, then who knows? Maybe we’d have all been nicer. Perhaps we’d have even made him our top friend.
These days, Tom is a travel photographer and you can find him on Instagram. He’s even got the same profile photo he had all those years ago!
Myspace: A Key Part of Internet History, and a Lot of Fun
Myspace was a core part of many users’ childhoods. And it played a crucial role in the rise of social media, with some of its features inspiring similar ones that we see today.
These days, you can still log into and use Myspace. But it’s by no means the same as it used to be. Still, though, isn’t it worth reminiscing a little?
