How MySpace lives on (in more than our memories).
Once the dominant social network, Myspace is now a faded memory for people who used the network about a decade ago. Even though it’s not the juggernaut it once was, it did pave the way for today’s best social media networks. Here’s a review of Myspace features and how they’ve been refined and reused by other web sites.
1. Top Friends
When you signed up for Myspace, the site’s creator, Tom was automatically added to your friend list. You remember that guy—sporting a white T-shirt, he was laughing over his shoulder in his profile picture. As you added friends, you could rearrange whose pictures appeared in the “Top 8” box on your profile, based on whom you felt closest to. This could be a contentious point for some people, especially if they checked their friend’s page only to find that they’d been bumped off the Top 8 and replaced with someone else.
To avoid these hurt feelings, you could also change your Myspace settings to include 12 or 16 friends in your top list. Facebook has something similar that lets you create a list of your “Close Friends.” Thankfully, this isn’t as visible as Myspace’s Top Friends feature. So you can sort your pals accordingly and no one who’s not on that list will be the wiser.
2. Customizable Background
If the default blue boxes and white background did nothing for you, there was a range of different wallpapers to choose from. A user could spend hours browsing different wallpapers and finding just the right one for their profile. If they couldn’t find one, they could also use their own custom image.
Today, Twitter also allows users to do the same, which lets both individuals and businesses alike express themselves visually on what’s mostly a text-driven social media network.
3. Profile Entertainment
You could also customize your profile by adding a song or playlist to serenade your visitors. It might have been fun for the user to pick these songs, but maybe it wasn’t as fun for a visitor to hear it. The song chosen might be one they hated with the fire of a thousand suns. If they wanted to hear music, they could always click on over to an artist’s Myspace page and listen that way.
Uploading video was another option. Again, maybe fun for the user to pick out, and fun for the visitor to watch once or twice, but not the most exciting feature. On the other hand, the static nature of the Myspace page does have quaint charm to it, compared to the constant stream of video content generated on today’s social media networks.
Aww, MySpace… believe it or not, I never closed my account. I don’t actually do anything with it, either, though. Read the whole thing here.