MySpace taught us how to do social media (week 3)



Availability and widespread of the Internet changed the world by allowing people to connect in new ways and giving everyone a voice. Suddenly you didn't need to have lots of money to share your ideas and you didn't need to be connected with powerful people through [traditional] media in order to have your voice reach millions. There was always a space for you. And it was called MySpace.

MySpace was the first social media site to really take hold of the popular imagination. The site went live in 2003 and capitalised on and expanded the Friendster model of social interaction online. While Friendster was more game-centric, MySpace allowed anyone to participate and converse on a wide variety of topics. It didn't take long for this concept to take hold and begin to grow. MySpace was made available to 20 million subscribers of eUniverse and had its backend support which meant that everything from finances to tech support were already in place. Having an interesting and stable social network led to skyrocketing numbers of users in a short amount of time. 

MySpace was the gateway for a whole generation into the world of online interaction. So many of the standards of social engagement that we take for granted today exist because of MySpace.

A defining aspect of social media is that it is free. Being free means that everyone has access. More access means more engagement. Platforms have to have large base in order to achieve more engagement. Being free allowed MySpace to reach a much wider audience which led to more users and acted like wildfire in terms of gaining popularity.

MySpace taught us that people do indeed want to put themselves out there. It was the first time that individuals connected through the Internet to a wider community of people who the interacted with in real life in a way that wasn't a conversation. And people were willing and ready to post intimate details of their life online for all the world to see.

MySpace allowed to "favourite" your friends. Though you might have had hundreds of friends, the top friends were right there on your page. This feature made or broke countless relationships and moving forward no other social network allowed a public ranking system. Facebook, for example, allows to categorise your friends but these categories are private.

One of coolest features of MySpace was that it allowed to personalise and customise your space. Basic format and function were maintained however users were free to shape their page as they would like (early users could even manipulate HTML). MySpace brought profile pictures into the masses and allowed users willing to invest time to make the place their own with fonts, gifs, images, backgrounds and text. We see the legacy of that personalisation everywhere on social media today (even here, in this blog) with platforms pushing boundaries of customisation while working to preserve the structure that brings familiarity. 

Although today MySpace is only a shadow of its former self, it still remains a wonderful insight into early stages of shaping of modern social media. MySpace taught and showed what it meant to have an online persona and gave everyone a voice. In some sense it even shaped the world. And for a lot of people it truly was their first space on the Internet. 

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