Have you ever wished there was a way to relive your entire middle school career? Have you ever wished you could relive it on the internet? The answer to both of these questions is probably no, which is why you probably haven't logged onto your Myspace profile recently. These days we keep up with our Facebooks, Twitters, Instagrams and Pinterests, but the days of profile songs and comment boxes will always have a special place in our hearts. Admit it, taking the surveys you found posted in your Bulletin Board was a pretty serious hobby in seventh grade. Myspace profiles were like strange, awkward scrapbooks that permanently preserved our former selves on the internet forever. Yay?
Nothing on your Myspace profile said as much about you as your choice in profile song. Song choice was always carefully calculated, and if someone had the nerve to steal your song you had every right to start an internet war. Eventually we all got clever enough — or obsessive enough — to find the HTML code that would hide our music player so that no one who visited your Myspace page could find the name of your song, or stop it from playing. They were forced to appreciate your music, which was always very important because, after all, you spent a solid three hours searching for the perfect song to capture the overall mood of your profile page. If you were particularly expressive with your Myspace, you changed your profile song almost daily so it corresponded with the many moods of your middle school self.
Along with adding HTML code to our music players, I think we can all agree that there was a point in time when we actually became dedicated to learning and understanding how HTML codes worked. Entire nights in 2007 were spent editing our layouts, adjusting our picture scroll boxes and adding photos from our Photobuckets, and of course making a meticulously detailed list of all your best friends and inside jokes in your heroes section (in custom fonts of course, because everything looks great in Comic Sans). Once your profile page looked perfect, you had to post the mandatory “Updated profile page" bulletin inviting everyone to visit your profile and leave a comment in your comment box telling you how much they love your totally cute new layout. And any time you changed your default picture there was the obligatory “New default pic! Pc4pc" bulletin.
The most prominent (and in hindsight probably the strangest) aspect of Myspace was having a “Top Friends." Top Friends was essentially the “subtweet" of our early social networking career, meaning it let us passive-aggressively tell the entire internet community who we were unhappy with every day. In retrospect, this whole concept just seems pretty outrageous. In what world did it seem acceptable to allow teens and pre-teens to publicly rank their friends on the internet? Who let Tom get away with that one? That's a cyberbullying lawsuit waiting to happen. Regardless, there were very few tactics of middle school social warfare that were as serious as moving your former friends down on your Top Friends list.
These days, if we tried to visit our old Myspace site, most of us wouldn't even recognize it (believe me, I've tried). As the internet evolved and our social network interests moved on to bigger and better things, Myspace has become the desolate home of aspiring musician profiles and those individuals still technologically stuck in 2005. But our generation can remember Myspace in its prime. It provided our preteen selves with everything we needed. Why use Facebook? That was for adults. You can't even use a custom layout, so what's the point? Forget Mark Zuckerberg, we idolized Tom as the true social network genius of the early 2000s.
Do you think we could add him on Facebook now?
