MySpace (the real one)

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

~ the last words ~

myspace launched in august 2003. it was founded by tom anderson and chris dewolfe, who had been running a marketing company in los angeles. the original audience was bands. you could put up a band profile, upload songs, list your tour dates. for the first year that was most of what myspace was for.

by 2004 myspace had become a general-purpose social network. by 2005 it was the largest social network in the english-speaking world. news corp bought it for 580 million dollars in july 2005 at the absolute peak of pre-facebook social media valuation. by 2008 facebook had passed myspace in users globally. by 2010 myspace was hemorrhaging traffic. news corp sold it in 2011 for 35 million dollars, a 95 percent loss.

in turkey the social network of the same era was hi5. myspace was something i mostly heard about through american and british friends. but the cultural footprint of myspace was big enough that even outside the english-speaking world, you knew what a top 8 was, what tom looked like (the smiling guy with white t-shirt), and what auto-playing profile songs meant.

~ the record ~

~ the top 8 ~

the top 8 was the defining myspace feature. you could pick eight friends to display in a special section at the top of your profile. these eight were visible to everyone who looked at your page. moving someone in or out of your top 8 was a public statement.

this caused real social drama. friendships got tested over top 8 placement. couples broke up over it. the meta-game of who-was-in-whose-top-8 was a constant background social calculation. you would visit someone's profile not just to see their photos but specifically to see who was in their top 8 today, and where you were in your own friends' top 8 lists.

myspace eventually let users expand the top to 12 friends and then to arbitrary numbers. this defused the drama and removed the feature's whole purpose. by 2010 nobody cared about the top friends list because it was no longer scarce. scarcity had been the point.

~ profile customization ~

myspace let you write raw HTML and CSS into your profile description field. people exploited this to completely redesign their profile pages. there were entire websites dedicated to free myspace profile templates. you would copy a chunk of code, paste it into your "about me" section, and your profile would now have a custom background, custom fonts, animated gifs, and a music player.

this was a security disaster waiting to happen, and it did happen, repeatedly. the most famous incident was the samy worm in 2005, where one user (samy kamkar) wrote a piece of javascript that would automatically add him as a friend to anyone who viewed his profile, then propagate to their profile too. within 20 hours over a million users had been infected. samy got prosecuted. myspace patched the hole. the customizability stayed mostly intact for several more years.

this kind of openness produced a real visual culture. myspace profiles were ugly, beautiful, weird, embarrassing, and personal in a way modern social profiles are not. instagram makes you fit into their aesthetic. myspace let you fail at design in your own way. that is more interesting.

~ the music ~

the auto-playing music was the other defining myspace feature. when you visited someone's profile, a song would start playing. you could not always turn it off easily. each profile had a custom music selection. on band profiles, the music was the band. on personal profiles, it was usually whatever the user wanted to project (emo songs, hip hop, indie pop).

the music feature is also why myspace mattered for the music industry. unsigned bands would put their songs on myspace. fans would visit their profiles. the band could check stats on plays. several careers got real momentum from myspace pages, including arctic monkeys and lily allen. myspace was, briefly, the place where new music broke before radio caught up.

~ the final blow ~

facebook launched at harvard in february 2004 and slowly opened up to the rest of the world. by 2008 facebook was bigger than myspace globally. by 2009 it was bigger in the US too. facebook's clean design, real-name policy, and consistent feature set made myspace's customizable chaos feel dated. the audience migrated within about three years.

news corp made several unpopular decisions during the decline. the redesigns made the site uglier. the executive team kept changing. tom anderson left in 2009. chris dewolfe left a few months after. by 2010 myspace was a corporate property without its founders, with declining traffic, and with no clear direction.

news corp sold it in june 2011 for 35 million dollars. specific media (a digital ad company) bought it. justin timberlake was part of the buyer group. the new owners pivoted myspace to be a music-focused product. that pivot has continued in various forms ever since. myspace.com is still online in 2026 but it has nothing to do with what myspace meant.

~ what we lost ~

the customizable profile. nobody lets you write CSS into your profile anymore. the closest equivalent is your tumblr theme, and tumblr is also mostly dead. linkedin profiles all look the same. instagram bios are 150 characters. myspace let you make a page that was unmistakably yours, even if it looked terrible. that is a lost form of online expression.

the auto-playing song. modern profiles are silent. there is no way to announce "this is the music i identify with right now" by simply having it play when someone visits. spotify profiles try to be this and they are not the same thing. the auto-play was awkward and aggressive and that was its honest charm.

the top 8. nobody publicly ranks their friends anymore. instagram has a "close friends" toggle but it is private. the publicness of the top 8 was the social pressure that gave it weight. modern social networks have decided that pressure is bad. they may be right. it was also the source of a lot of meaningful drama.

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