Myspace
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"September 9, 1998. It was a dark time in our nation's history. America was reeling from a succession of disasters - Myspace was launched the previous week, thus revealing to a shocked nation what a bunch of idiots their children were." —Dan Szymborski, Thoughts on the Death of Jeter
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A social networking website that boasted over 60 million users at its height of popularity, Myspace was easily one of the largest websites of all time. The site was generally known as a meeting place for kids, a marketing venue for bands and celebrities, and a hunting ground for creeps. Thanks to that last one, it figured prominently into Dateline's To Catch a Predator series, as Perverted Justice used it to attract potential child molesters.
Myspace also lets anyone make a kind of mini-webpage, so be on the lookout for eye-stabbing graphics and a loud mp3 of that single you hated from 2002, except louder!
It was the most popular site around in the mid-Noughties, but despite its once explosive popularity, the site has dwindled down to a barren wasteland as fickle users have almost completely abandoned it for its competitor, Facebook. After a change in management in 2010, it attempted to reinvent itself as "Social Entertainment", with more of an emphasis on entertainment than social networking. It then massively overhauled its homepage and new profile layouts, changed its logo, and then attempted to force longtime users with original 1.0 profiles to upgrade. This was all done to try and attract more people to the site, which had steadily been losing traffic for a long time, though it ended up having the opposite effect, making its owners at the time, News Corp., quite agitated. Long gone are the days when Tom Anderson, founder and practically the mascot of Myspace, would automatically add users. In fact, he was fired from the company in 2009.
Most of the remaining users weren't too happy about the changes. Popular opinions of the changes were that they're more than a little messy, and they slowed down even the newest computers. Users can now expect to have their friend requests page spammed by celebrities and pages dedicated to whatever is currently celebrating its fifteen minutes of fame. And once a month since December 2010 they've allowed a celebrity to "hijack" the site in an effort to attract the celebrity's fans. After huge outcries of They Changed It, Now It Sucks, Myspace agreed to allow users to get their 1.0 profiles back by "downgrading" (1.0 profiles always gave much more freedom to edit and personalize, when using the right layout codes, hence hardly anyone ever "upgraded" from them unless forced to).
It still attracted a fair share of role players even long after the decline began, since the site is more suited for RPing than Facebook (which tends to delete RP profiles). But even then, many of them have now flocked to other sites like Sitemodel, Roleplayer.me and OneWorldRolePlay (which more closely resemble the Myspace of 2006 and even support the same 1.0 profile layouts), and not all of them came back in 2011.
After failing to bring in more traffic with its Retool, News Corp. finally sold the site in July 2011 to a company called Specific Media for a mere $35 million (compared to the $580 million News Corp. bought Myspace for in 2005 back when it was popular), and apparently Justin Timberlake has a large stake in the site now as well as a say in its creative direction, which seems to be as of now following the same "Social Entertainment" path it was already on. Who knows what the future has in store for the site.
Thirteen Ways To Fit In With The Rest of Myspace
- Lie about your age. Join the growing trend of teenagers who are 69 years old!
- Grab a generic profile template off any of the random Myspace graphics sites available online! [1]
- List your income as over $250,000, and watch your friends squirm! (If you're called on it, make a joke about exchange rates!)
- Post a bulletin prompting other users to add "Myspace Legends"!
- Take a photo of yourself in the mirror holding a cameraphone!
- Take a photo of yourself holding your camera in your outstretched arm while you mug for the camera!
- And for triple bonus points, do a Fat Girl Angle Shot. Barring that, a standard Duckface maneuver will do.
- Use any combination of the following: massively large pictures that take 15 minutes to load, scrolling banners, event posters or automatic music players!
- Create fake drama by pretending that your friend committed suicide!
- Add a fake celebrity or Tila Tequila as your friend![2]
- For bonus edgy points, add a different, less mainstream porn star!
- Add Over Nine Thousand apps, and watch your bulletins overflow with app-generated bulletins!
- ...and of course, have a Myspace page that you haven't updated since sometime in 2008.
- Banned in China: In countries where that is often done (Iran, China, Syria, Turkey, etc.).
- Cap: Towards 2010, Myspace introduced an inbox that counted the number of unread messages, but only counted up to 999. People who had been careless with their messages for several years now had to go back and finally clean out their inboxes.
- Character Blog: Just about every popular fictional character ever could be found on the site.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Many see the former CEO Mike Jones as this, who specifically stated in interviews that Myspace is no longer a social network, but Social Entertainment.
- Creator Backlash: Tom said this, and on his Facebook profile no less.
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- Defeat Means Friendship: Myspace eventually admitted defeat to Facebook, and allowed its users to sync their Myspace profiles with their Facebook profiles.
- Myspace creator Tom Anderson says he is quite fond of Facebook and he prefers Facebook nowadays since his leave in 2009.
- Dying Town: The Internet equivalent.
- Emo Teen: At its height it seemed to attract a lot of these.
- Eternal September: Myspace was once low-key, believe it or not, in much the same way Facebook was once, but then its popularity exploded in 2004 to 2005, attracting the aforementioned Emo Teen demographic. But it went full circle eventually and by 2010 became low-key again, even though that was the last thing the people in charge wanted.
- Flame War: It was never hard to run into one.
- Follow the Leader
- Hotlinked Image Switch: One of the most (in)famous cases. Switch happened in late December 2006, leading to about 140,000 downloads of off-site Goatse.cx image in January, over 30,000 served in the peak day.
- Incompetence, Inc.: As if losing people to Facebook wasn't bad enough, they had to dig themselves into a deeper ditch by ignoring all the users who were still on board with their Retool. Basically, they gambled away their longtime users in hopes of attracting more new ones, and lost hard.
- News Corp bought it at the very peak of popularity and value. It's been a depreciating asset ever since.
- Interface Screw
- Moral Guardians: Too numerous to mention.
- New Media Are Evil: It was once ground zero for pedophile hunters, and the media portrayed it as a sexual predator hot spot, mainly thanks to Dateline. Facebook, for some odd reason, has avoided this stigma, even though it has far more people than Myspace did at its height.
- Online Personas
- Paedo Hunt
- Period Piece: Any work that describes a character "hooking up" with a partner online at the turn of the millennium would have to be cautious to name only sites that existed back then. That rules out a long list of everything from Facebook to Backpage (which didn't exist until 2004) so, suddenly, names of long-forgotten sites like Myspace which were popular in that era are recalled long enough to creep back into the narrative.
- Serious Business: Back in the day, serious drama arose over the placement of a friend in the "Top 8". If one of your best friends wasn't number one, or even on the top 8, there could be hell to pay if they were petty enough to get mad over it (and many people were). And when you delete someone from your friends list, you might as well be punching them in the gut.
- You could solve that problem once Myspace allowed you to make it a Top 12, 16, 20 or any increment of 4 up to 36.