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Social Networks

Whatever Happened to MySpace? (triblive.com) 64

Posted by EditorDavid from the old-friends dept.
In 2006 MySpace reportedly became America's most-visited web site — passing both Google and Yahoo Mail.

So what happened? TribLive reports: The co-founders, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, sold MySpace to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation for $580 million in 2005, and that company sold it to the online advertising company Specific Media and Justin Timberlake in 2011, which later became the ad tech firm Viant, according to SlashGear. Viant was bought by Time in 2016, which was acquired by Meredith Corporation at the end of 2017, according to The Guardian. Meredith then sold Myspace to Viant Technology LLC, which currently operates the platform, SlashGear said.

During its time under Timberlake, Myspace morphed from a social media platfrom and turned over a new leaf as a music discovery site, SlashGear reported. The once booming online atmosphere has turned into a ghost town, according to The Guardian. Despite the number of people on Myspace dwindling, a handful of devoted users remains.
The glory days of MySpace drew this bittersweet remembrance from TechRadar: Not everyone on the TechRadar team looks back on those early MySpace years fondly, with our US editor in chief Lance Ulanoff recalling that it "it was like peoples' brains had been turned inside out and whatever didn't stick, dropped onto the page and was represented as a GIF".

Many of us do, though, remember picking our Top 8s (the site's weird ranking system for your friends) and decorating our MySpace pages with as many flashing lights as possible.
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Whatever Happened to MySpace? More

Whatever Happened to MySpace?

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  • Bah! (Score:4, Funny)

    by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Sunday August 04, 2024 @09:45PM (#64680708)

    Bah... MySpace... newbies!

    Real Net veterans had a Geocities page where <blink>/</blink> was mandatory for any text greater than <h3></h3>.

    Ah... happy days!

    • Geocities was for fools. Real net surfers danced across favoured web rings.

    • Re:Bah! (Score:4, Funny)

      by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Sunday August 04, 2024 @11:30PM (#64680862)

      blink and marquee tags.

      (Which also formed part of my arsenal for horrifying the graphic designer at work. Though my most evil creation for waterboarding our graphic designer involved discovering you could use CSS to tilt the entire page about 1 degree to the left, which made everything look slightly unaligned without making it obvious why it looked that way.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flink ( 18449 )

      My original website was at myisp.com/~username. I think then it was ccs.university.edu/~username and then finally the domain I registered sometime in the late 90s, which I still keep around for email and to host files I need remote access to.

  • TBH (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Sunday August 04, 2024 @09:45PM (#64680710)

    This site doesn't seem to be quite what it was in 2006, either.

  • . . . with your faceyspaces and your mytubes and your youbooks . . .

  • I had an account on Friendster, but it was badly managed, and had some technical issues. :(

    Before that I was on Delphi in some of the groups...loved the menu driven, text interface especially in the era of dial-up modem. :)

    JoshK.

  • What ever happened to CompuServe?

    I kind of miss the old ('90's) internet. Largely useless... but a hell of a lot less creepy and paranoid. But this cat video my sister sent me today...

    • People used to spell Compu$serve with a dollar sign for a reason. Even after they started to AOL-fy it with GUI client software, you could still access it with VT-100 terminal emulator software as you would any other text based BBS.

    • Re:Follow up: (Score:5, Informative)

      by kriston ( 7886 ) on Sunday August 04, 2024 @10:50PM (#64680832) Homepage Journal

      CompuServe always cost too much when compared to other services like Prodigy and, notably, Delphi.

      America Online bought CompuServe and, after several years, shut down CompuServe's weird text-only 36-bit service in favor of "CompuServe 2000" which was just AOL with different branding, or "Chrome" as AOL called it.

      • CompuServe always cost too much when compared to other services like Prodigy and, notably, Delphi.

        America Online bought CompuServe and, after several years, shut down CompuServe's weird text-only 36-bit service in favor of "CompuServe 2000" which was just AOL with different branding, or "Chrome" as AOL called it.

        Compuserve was geared toward IBM PC experienced users from the business world. People that were comfortable with DOS, spreadsheets, and other business productivity programs. AOL and Prodigy were more marketed towards the general public just buying computers for the first time. There was a huge culture difference. Compuserve heavily emphasized things like online stock tracking, while the others were pushing the social aspect of their services, mainly their chat rooms. That's what I mainly miss about 90's int

    • When I started work as a systems administrator in 1994 I was given a CompuServe account to use. The company president had no issues with how much I used it but I rarely did, only when necessary. I couldn't believe the bill that could rack up from just mild use. A little over a year later I connected the company to the Internet and told the president we didn't need a CompuServe account any longer. Then I was tasked with writing the company's first web page ... ugh. HTML is an abomination.

    • I dunno, I started my online experience in CompuServe and it was a great resource for accessing newsgroups - I basically learned to code there.

      • It was expensive, but I agree on the utility at the time. It was also a great stepping stone to the modern Internet.

    • My mother still has and uses her compuserve email addresses.

  • In soviet Russia (Score:5, Funny)

    by devious_malcontent ( 2752947 ) on Sunday August 04, 2024 @10:19PM (#64680772) Homepage
    In soviet Russia, it called "ourSpace", comrade.

  • If you had a C64, it was ahead of its time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • It was mainly a music streaming site, and the last time I used it was in the late 2000s or early 2010s for that purpose. I never bothered to check back since then.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      When you go back, you might notice that virtually all of the music on MySpace was "accidentally" deleted since then.

  • Well, they "accidentally" deleted a decade of music a few years ago, so there's that little tidbit of history to consider.

  • Myspace was basically what Facebook was to become, once FB dropped the student ID requirement to use it. Basically the name "Facebook" was loosely rooted in "yearbook". and was meant to be a site for college students. Once they opened the site up to the general public, it's popularity took off and because of that, it turned into a cesspit. Basically another "eternal September" like when AOL users were let loose on Usenet in September of 1993, but even most "AOLers" weren't *that* low class. :-|
    • I stand corrected: "AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994" "The Eternal September" refers to a sudden influx of new Usenet users starting in late 1993 and early 1994 which includes AOL, making experienced Usenet users feel like "The September that never ended".

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        they were an influx of casuals, which for all the moaning still wasn't joe sixpack

        at that point it was still only nerds "loitering" online, joe would take care of some business (including porn) and be done with the computer

        myspace septembers tipped that "only nerds loitering" barrier, the internet wasn't just a tool anymore

        this was the shift of the appeal, but it wasn't until the mobile era (everything As A Service, autoupdates, Mother May I phoning home, ubiquitous wifi, etc) that the means were dumbed dow

        • I remember that some groups had some real hard core gatekeeping going on, and posting to those with an @aol.com was a nonstarter. They would swarm on that in an instant. There were other major problems too and spam and troll floods basically ended it's glory days. Unfortunately, we need Usenet now probably more than ever (in principle) as so many web forums and "social" media are going beyond the usual "don't post hate or spam" and cracking down hard on anyone who deviates in the slightest from the politic
    • The reason Facebook won over Myspace is because Myspace covered your space in ads, and didn't do any kind of filtering. You could get ads for AFF right next to pictures of your girlfriend.

      Facebook is now covered with ads as well, but they do a good job disguising it.

    • Re:Facebook ate their lunch (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thomst ( 1640045 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @09:26AM (#64681606) Homepage

      Malay2bowman misspoke:

      Once they opened the site up to the general public, it's popularity took off and because of that, it turned into a cesspit. Basically another "eternal September" like when AOL users were let loose on Usenet in September of 1993, but even most "AOLers" weren't *that* low class. :-|

      AOL didn't open the gates of Hell, flooding the Internet with clueless, unwashed dimwits, until September-ish1994.

      I remember the horrifying event - and its timing - well, because LAN Times (a McGraw-Hill biweekly publication devoted mainly to servicing the Novell NetWare community) began publishing my @internet column in early April that year.

      @internet began as a kind of "Baedeker's for the Internet," aimed at my peers in the Novell universe, who regularly assured me that they knew the Internet was important, but didn't have the time to figure out how to use it by themselves. It was a wildly successful feature that started my career in computer journalism - entirely by accident, after I cornered LAN Times' then-editor-in-chief, Susan Breidenbach, at the SFNUG Christmas party in December 1993 to urge her to initiate just such a regular feature. (Silly me, I expected that, were I successful in pitching the idea, she would assign it to one of her existing staffers, and I could bask in the virtuous feeling of having done a Good Thing for my fellow LAN administrators. Imagine my surprise when she replied, "It sounds like something that could be worth trying. So, when can I expect your first column?" instead.)

      AOL's horrible, primitive Web browser (Windows-only, if you please) was nonetheless capable of allowing a million and a half entirely-unprepared newbies to stumble around on the Web without a clue among them about how to behave on the Internet. Overnight, it was as if what had been a relatively-civilized community of relatively-clueful, mostly-techie users was invaded by ignorant, barbarian hordes tromping through our marble palaces with muddy boots, blinking stupidly, and drooling all over the furniture.

      It was an utterly classic illustration of the tragedy of the commons - and the experience has been branded in my soul, ever since ...

  • Real bulletin boards, with cork and pins and handwritten notes.

    I would say "get off my lawn" but lawns hadn't been invented yet.

  • A Harvard student was better at it, and then the Chinese Communist Party was better at it than him. Who knew? lol

  • It died. Everyone involved with it was murdered.

    • It died. Everyone involved with it was murdered.

      The answer to "What happened to MySpace?" is: Facebook

      Facebook did the same thing but much better. Simple as that. Facebook had a leader, love him or hate him, with a singular vision for the platform, and he ate MySpace alive.

  • This is what happened to MySpace: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Monday August 05, 2024 @02:37AM (#64681046)

    The founder(s) cashed out, epic style, to the tune of half a billion dollars or something like that.
    They took the money and ran and never looked back.

    AFAIK the principal founder even avoided any silicon valley projects from there on out and is living his life as a wealthy privateer doing what ever he wants and avoiding tech-hypes like the plaque.

    And all that is about as smart a move that you can make if you ask me.

  • Need to ask (Score:3)

    by Slashythenkilly ( 7027842 ) on Monday August 05, 2024 @03:48AM (#64681090)
    Is Tom still inboxing people as they sign up?

  • Many of us do, though, remember picking our Top 8s (the site's weird ranking system for your friends) and decorating our MySpace pages with as many flashing lights as possible.

    Ha ha! We were so stupid then, weren't we?

    Thank God that we replaced all that with the cultural erudition, dignified restraint, and understated elegance of, say, TikTok ...

  • Most people had no idea how to manage their page, and just made it as annoying as possible.

  • Been there a couple of times maybe, following some link or other.

    Every page seems to be different, and I recall having to always mute my speakers.

    And the blinky blinky stuff ............. oh my ......

    But I understand it got a bunch of people interested in tech / making websites, etc. So I guess it wasn't all bad.

  • Myspace had major troubles with users coming back to it and turned into a ghost town long before it was turned into a music discovery site by Timberlake. The attempt to turn it into a music discovery was a solid move in my opinion - if it had to be ressurected it would have to be turned into something completely different or do a complete overhaul. Myspace died because it was simply beaten by facebook popularity - all the user base moves there
    • Myspace died because it tried to become more like Facebook rather than further differentiating itself from it. Facebook allowed me to reconnect with family and acquaintances I had never encountered online before. Messaging became the normal way to let someone know evening plans, or to send an interesting link to a specific person. I can't even estimate the number of people I'd deduced had met their demise when I'd see the same face three or four times when checking my feed. Facebook was (is) about where you

  • But, spacehey is a good representation of the old myspace.

  • It gave people the opportunity to be creative and it showed that 99% of the population is not creative and just produces mostly repetitive crap.

  • "...Top 8s (the site's weird ranking system for your friends) and decorating our MySpace pages with as many flashing lights as possible."

    I also remember that MySpace didn't fiddlefuck with your feed, stuffing advertising, sponsored garbage, and shit you never asked for like Facebook does. At least when you went to MySpace and hit a friend's profile, you saw their posts in a proper chronological order without all that other crap.

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