Myspace IM

» see messenger.myspace.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

myspace im was a windows desktop instant messenger that myspace shipped in may 2006. it was a real native client. you signed in with your myspace credentials and got an aim looking buddy list of your myspace friends. it did voice calls, including voice calls to and from regular phone numbers. it had a feature called zaps, which were small audio plus image animations you sent to people instead of a typed reply. by version 1.0.823 in december 2009 it also did skype voice interop, so you could call skype users from inside myspace im.

none of it mattered. myspace's whole population in 2006 already had aim or msn running in the task tray. nobody installed a fourth client to talk to the same people. myspace's actual messaging happened where it always had, in profile comments and in the inbox at the top of the page. the desktop im sat on a quarter of myspace desktops as a notifier for new comments, and on most of those it got uninstalled within a month.

by 2009 myspace was already losing to facebook. the june 2009 layoff round cut a third of the staff, and the strategic line shifted to a relaunch as a music-and-entertainment destination rather than a friends-and-comments social network. the standalone im client was the wrong product for that direction. they pulled it from active development through 2010, and by the time the justin timberlake era myspace launched in 2013 the windows client was gone. download mirrors kept the installer alive for years longer than the servers did.

i was on msn messenger that whole period. msn was universal in turkey from about 2002 onward. every laptop in every internet cafe had it open. myspace itself never really reached turkey, because the local audience went to hi5 in roughly the same window, and the population that would have been on myspace was on hi5 instead. so myspace im was twice removed from me: the network was wrong, and the client was for a network i was not on. i remember reading about it on engadget and thinking it was a strange product, an im client for a website rather than for a person.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

im clients tied to individual social networks were a brief idea around 2006 to 2008. before that, the messengers (aim, msn, yahoo, icq) were universal multi-platform protocols you used regardless of which website you happened to be on. then social networks started imagining they needed their own native clients, pre-populated with the friend graph. facebook tried with facebook chat in the browser and never shipped a windows binary. myspace went all the way and made a real installer. the idea died with myspace, and the better lesson, which is that the social network is already the messenger, took until facebook messenger split in 2011 to fully land.

~ zaps ~

the most fondly remembered feature is zaps. they were short audio plus picture combos. you sent a zap and the other persons client played a fart sound and showed a cartoon of a person being hit by a pie, or whatever zap you chose from the menu. they were a 2006 idea about expressive communication that predated stickers and reaction gifs by years. they were not great, but they were trying. snapchat ten years later was still circling around the same idea: messages that are not just text.

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