The Evolution of Social Media Through MySpace
For many of us, social media is a daily activity. We can’t help but open our phones every hour, every minute, every second and see what someone else is doing or if someone “liked” one of our posts. It’s just the society we created. Back in the 1990s, we didn’t have a cellphone that could give social media, music, and news in the palm of our hands. We had to wait until we got home from work or school to see if our friends were home to talk to them.
We also had to make sure that no one needed the phone for long periods of time because, at that time, we had the large computers that had to use dial-up in order to connect to the internet, which was through the phone lines. Today we have so many options of social media outlets that help us connect with people and show our followers our likes, dislikes, what we are doing or thinking every second of the day.
Before we can talk about today’s social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, we need to talk about MySpace.
In August 2003, MySpace was born and was one of the earlier prototypes to Facebook (CBSNEWS.com). Similarly, Facebook users could add acquaintances, family, and friends to their online social network and communicate accordingly. Additionally, Twitter, its users could add macro and micro-celebrities to their social network as well. This is where Facebook and Twitter’s features culturally originated. In Myspace, you could customize your “space” by picking music you wanted to play when someone came to your page; also, you could choose a new background for whatever you were feeling that day or week. It was the first time many of us learned how to code to make something our own. According to Nicholas Jackson and Alexis C. Madrigal of the Atlantic, below is a timeline of the evolution of Myspace.
- August 2003: MySpace birthed from the bowels of eUniverse as Friendster clone.
- November 2003: Washington Post runs a story about social networking sites already asking, “Where is the money?”
- February 2004: TheFacebook.com launches at Harvard. For the first time ever, poking becomes widespread on the Ivy League campus.
- June 2004: MySpace breaks one million unique visitors per month.
- October 2004: REM posts album to MySpace, emulating thousands of smaller-name musicians who flocked to the site.
- December 2004: San Francisco Chronicle: “Users of MySpace could visit a profile of pop singer Hilary Duff and download three of her songs for free from a page surrounded by a marketing pitch for Secret Sparkle deodorant.”
- January 2005: MySpace hits a phase of exponential growth, gaining millions and millions of members in the first half of the year.
- July 2005: News Corp buys MySpace for $580 million. It claims 22 million members.
MySpace was the number one social media site from 2003–2008 until the rise of Facebook, which it surpassed in the number of users that MySpace had. After 2008 MySpace had a steady decline in users; however, today, MySpace laid the foundation for the big three to be successful but got complacent when it came to re-engineering, and failed to keep up with the consumer’s needs. There still is a MySpace site that has gone through some facelifts; however, it is not the social network that many turn to, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. MySpace was the beginning of the digital world for so many of us, and that is why I believe in its importance to the digital world that we all know today.
References:
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Jackson, N., & Madrigal, A. C. (2015, June 8). The Rise and Fall of MySpace. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/the-rise-and-fall-of-myspace/69444/
Ngak, C. (2014, February 4). Then and now: a history of social networking sites. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/then-and-now-a-history-of-social-networking-sites/7/