In April 2005, I arrived home from school and snuck into the designated computer room in my family’s suburban home.
I was 13 years old, wearing a zip-up valour tracksuit no doubt, and had just heard about a new website called Myspace.com from one of my friends at school.
Sitting down at my family’s desktop PC, I fired up Internet Explorer, typed in the domain, and entered my email address— swimming_queen_3_3@hotmail.com— to register.
Within months, all of my friends joined the site. And by the time I started high school in the fall, we had all swapped hours a night chatting on MSN Messenger for hours a night clicking around on Myspace.
The site was exciting. Unlike other social networking sites and chat rooms we’d tried, it felt like there were no rules on Myspace. We could message our friends, discover new music, customise our profiles to suit our ever-changing teenage personalities, and best of all, we could stalk any profile we wanted.
There was also an element of exclusivity to Myspace with its Top 8— a feature that allowed users to rank their favourite friends from numbers 1 to 8. As teenage girls part of a competitive friend group, Top 8 gave us an easy opportunity to raise the social stakes.
Despite this initial thrill, our interest in Myspace quickly died. By 2006, most of my friends were primarily interacting on Facebook and two years later, I logged onto my Myspace account for the last time.
As 90s babies, my friends and I were the Myspace generation. But regardless of the site’s unprecedented success, it couldn’t hold my generation’s attention for longer than a few years.
Sitting here writing this in 2024, I haven’t used Myspace in nearly 15 years. And chances are, neither have you.
So what happened? How did the most prolific social networking site of the early 2000s become totally obsolete?
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