Do You Remember Myspace? It May Be Returning…
I built a Myspace profile generator today. Because, why not? I guess I was feeling a little nostalgic for how simple social media was at the start.
You fill in the fields, watch the profile assemble itself next to you, and download the whole thing as a high-res PNG you can post anywhere. Tom is locked at number one in your top eight and there’s no setting to change that. Because, of course.
The premise is simple. If Myspace were still standing, this is what my profile would look like.
Mine says Humacao, PR. Status engaged, here for friends and networking, occupation AI keynote speaker. Mood: nostalgic. The song playing is Take the Long Way Home. Because, duh.
Then I went looking for something else and found out Myspace might actually be coming back.
Tim and Chris Vanderhook, the brothers who bought the thing in 2011, turned up in a new documentary saying they still own the brand and they intend to relaunch it. No date. They tried once already, in 2013, and it didn’t take. Their line on trying again was that if the next one doesn’t work either, they’ll do it after that.
I have a soft spot for that answer. It’s the correct answer, and almost nobody gives it.
What they’d be bringing back
Making the generator reminded me of the one thing Myspace had that nothing since has attempted, or wanted, to copy.
You could make it messy. You could break it.
There was a text field, and whatever you put in that field became your page. Custom CSS. A song that started playing whether your visitor wanted it or not. A background image that made your own text unreadable. Cursors that trailed sparkles. An entire generation of teenagers learned HTML because they wanted a glitter cursor, which is a better argument for hobbyist computing than anything I could write.
The pages were hideous. They were also yours.
A profile today is a photo, a bio field with a character limit, and a link. Everyone gets the same template. Some designer in an office decided how your page looks and they were probably right, and being right is exactly the problem. Nobody has learned anything from a page they can’t sabotage.
Then there was the Top 8, which remains the most brutal feature ever shipped by a social network. It was a public ranking of your friends. You could edit it. And it was visible to all the people you ranked. Because. Well, just because.
Nobody would launch that today. I’m not saying they should. Whatever you think of it, it was pretty darned real.
The pitch, and the problem with the pitch
What the Vanderhooks are selling is a platform that isn’t built around an algorithm and isn’t designed to keep you scrolling until you hate yourself. That’s a real appetite. A Forrester analyst told CNBC the excitement is nostalgia for a less algorithmic time, and pointed at the growth of Substack and private Discord communities as evidence people are already voting with their attention.
I’m writing this on Substack. Point taken.
But an appetite isn’t a product, and the brand isn’t the thing people miss. Nobody is nostalgic for the Myspace login screen. What they miss is the feeling of a corner of the internet that behaved like a bedroom instead of a lobby. We liked the bad wallpaper, song that played and the clutter that meant something to you and nothing to anyone else.
You don’t get that back by removing the algorithm. You get it back by handing people a text field and letting them ruin their own page with it.
At its peak in 2008 Myspace was pulling something like 115 million visitors a month, and then Facebook came along and did it cleaner, and clean won. Which should tell you the ugliness wasn’t a flaw they failed to fix. It was the product.
The part I’d want in writing
Let’s say they pull it off. Say the pages come back and the songs autoplay and there’s a Top 8 again.
It’s still their platform.
Facebook shut my account off in 2009. I’d hit the 5,000 friend cap and was messaging people toward my fan page, which got me flagged as a spammer. I uploaded a photo ID, appealed, and eventually got back in. Then they did it again in 2015, and the reason on file was that I was pretending to be someone else.
Think about it. It was me. Pretending to be me. Over the years I’ve had a never-ending battle with people pretending to be me. It’s been a constant game of Whack-a-Joel. (See what I did there?)
Both times the appeal worked. Both times somebody I knew had to make noise on my behalf, which is not a strategy so much as a run of luck. It taught me something I keep having to relearn: an audience on someone else’s platform is a lease, and you’ve never seen the terms. Don’t build on rented land. You’ve heard it. It’s still true, and it’s about to be true again.
Almost nothing anyone made on the original Myspace survived. It’s not archived. Poof! Gone.Millions of pages people spent real hours on, hand-coded badly, and there’s no copy anywhere.
Which is why the export button is the only part of this whole project that’s an actual improvement on the original.
A PNG is a file. It sits on your drive. Nobody can suspend it, migrate it into a void, or decide you’re impersonating yourself.
Perhaps I need to add an option to uglify pages as well. Perhaps that was always the point.
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Use the Myspace Profile Generator for free at https://artificialintelligence.studio/myspace and let your nostalgia flag fly.
