By 2010 MySpace had lost its crown to Facebook and was shedding users and staff under News Corp, which had bought it in 2005. In October it relaunched as a "social entertainment" site with a new logo, but the customisable, music-heavy MySpace of the mid-2000s was already a memory.
The MySpace profile was the last great customisable page on the mainstream web: users pasted HTML and CSS into their About Me sections, added glitter text and animated backgrounds, chose a profile song that auto-played, and agonised over their Top 8 friends. Tom, the co-founder, was everyone's first friend.
MySpace Music remained genuinely important for bands, and the site still had tens of millions of visitors in 2010, but the redesigns and layoffs told the story. News Corp sold the company in 2011 for a reported $35 million, a fraction of the $580 million it had paid.
- Domain in 2010
- myspace.com
- Launched
- August 2003
- Founders
- Tom Anderson, Chris DeWolfe
- Owner in 2010
- News Corporation
- Status today
- Still exists, transformed
What people used it for
- Customised profile pages
- Discovering bands and profile songs
- Bulletins, comments and friend rankings
Interface characteristics
- Fully customisable profiles via pasted CSS and HTML
- Auto-playing profile songs
- Top 8 friends box
- Glitter graphics, animated backgrounds and cursor effects
- Dense two-column layout with blue link text
Notable features
- MySpace Music streaming for bands
- October 2010 relaunch with the "My____" logo
- "Mashup with Facebook" integration (November 2010)
What happened later
News Corp sold MySpace in 2011 for a reported $35 million. It survives as a music-focused site, and a 2019 server migration lost most user uploads made before 2016.
Archived on the Wayback Machine
Archived pages open on web.archive.org (Internet Archive). They are historical captures, not part of this exhibit.
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