News has recently begun to circulate that mid-2000s social networking site MySpace might be looking to make a comeback. Details are scant at this point, but the company’s current owners confirmed their plans in a recent documentary about the site’s rise and fall.
If you were online during the early 2000s, you may remember the shift from the static web pages of what is termed “Web 1.0” to the more interactive sites of “Web 2.0” with blogs such as LiveJournal allowing users to comment on each other’s posts and engage with each other. Social networking sites began to appear, allowing people with similar interests to connect with each other. My first brush with social networking was via Friends Reunited, a British site that was based around connecting people who had attended the same school or university, or who had worked for the same company or served in the armed forces together.
In 2003, MySpace appeared. It essentially took the idea of a personal web page like GeoCities, Tripod and Angelfire, but updated it for the Web 2.0 era. Users could post a profile photo, write an “About Me” page, list their interests and curate a group of friends. It was easy to create blog posts and comment on other people’s posts, as well as send messages to other users. The more tech-savvy could use HTML and CSS coding to customise the appearance of their page, and even choose a song or video to play automatically when someone opened their page.
MySpace became wildly popular and in 2005 was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $580 million. Between 2005 and 2008, MySpace was the most popular social networking site in the world. In 2006, it beat Google as the most visited website in the United States. It began losing ground to Facebook in 2008 and began to decline in popularity. Though MySpace still exists, it is largely forgotten today in spite of several attempts by various owners over the years to revitalise the site.
I was never a member of MySpace. I didn’t really see the point of social networking that was not tied to some real-world experience like having attended the same school (see Friends Reunited above). A lot of people that I knew were really into Myspace, however, and some spent several hours a day on the site, often when they should have been working! At some point someone sent me an invite to Facebook and I joined that as a relative latecomer, but even there I have never been particularly into the whole social networking / social media thing. It’s just something that I use to keep in touch with people that I might otherwise not normally interact with on a regular basis.
Or at least that’s how Facebook used to be. Much has been written about the decay of social media and other online platforms over the years. The owners of MySpace seem rightly to recognise that people are tired of the modern, enshittified version of social media with its endless, algorithmically driven stream of angry political content and AI slop crowding out anything meaningful. However, it may seem like a strange time to be thinking of relaunching MySpace, when disenchantment with social media seems to be on the rise. Research by the Financial Times has shown that social media usage actually peaked in 2022.
There is a current trend among Millennials and Generation Z, who essentially grew up online, to move away from social media, citing its negative effects on their mental health. There’s also a corresponding nostalgia for the less technologically dominated 1990s and early 2000s, and an embrace of analogue media such as vinyl records.
Here may lie the opportunity. Somewhere in the Millennial and Gen Z nostalgia trend there might also be a nostalgia for a social media that is about making connections rather than posting content and chasing likes and online approval.
MySpace will face some tough challenges in making this work, however. A recent CNBC article points out that the original MySpace users are now in mid-life and unlikely to take up another new online platform, so the product must be redesigned to be appealing to a younger demographic while retaining the original MySpace vibe. The question of how to make it all work financially without heavy, targetted advertising and algorithmically driven, addictive feeds will also be a big one to address.
Only time will tell if MySpace can be successfully relaunched and carve out a niche in an already saturated social media market. I’ll be interested to see how things turn out. Maybe the new version of MySpace might be more to my liking. If so, perhaps I’ll see you there!
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