Before we regarded social media as an outlet to share personal stories, photos, and basically every waking thought with not only our friends and family, but also potential employers and the professional world, we expressed ourselves on our Myspace profiles, and we didn't give a damn who saw what (because we knew our parents weren't on Myspace). Before social media became a entity larger than one or two sites, we were enthralled with the customization and communication we could achieve. Before we were all given the same boring blue and white profile, we spent hours creating a place on the web that was more ourselves than we were.
Now the MySpace we knew is obsolete (literally, you can't even find your old profile), here are the seven things you miss most.
1. Bulletins
Often done in group settings, bulletins were like surveys filled with personal questions that were basically proof that you did more than sit around after school eating Hot Pockets and taking MySpace surveys. At one point in my early cyber years, bulletins were the most effective way to communicate to person X that you had indeed moved on to person Y without actually telling them directly.
Example:
Who was the last person you kissed?
Taylor: OMFG, not Josh. Hehe
Jessy: Gaige. ROTFL
The point here is that it has been effectively communicated to every person in these girls’ friends list that Taylor and Jessy while having kissed other people were most definitely not over them.
2. Top Friends
Life was so much easier when you knew where you ranked on his/her top friends. Not to mention it made navigating the waters of friend zone and friends with benefits much less painful. If you weren’t on his top friends, you were probably not on his mind. It was so much easier to casually drift apart from friends by slowly moving them down your top friends. Loads of drama were started over someone being moved ahead of you on your bestie’s top eight.
3. Tom
The original Mark Zuckerberg, minus the drama.Tom was your first friend and the butt of a lot of MySpace-themed jokes. He was also your first real experience with betrayal when you realized he had a Facebook.
4. Profile songs
Need I say more? No, probably not. But I will say, nothing says MySpace crush like realizing his/her profile song is also one of your faves. Better go change mine so they notice.
5. Backgrounds
When you decided to re-do your profile you probably spent hours upon hours searching the web for the perfect images and background to suit how you felt like expressing yourself during that phase. Or maybe you were more of a seasonal person, beachy theme for summer, fall colors come autumn, the usual. This process made especially time-consuming if you had dial-up like I did. The devastation of realizing after all those hours of hard work, Public Enemy No. 1 had also chosen the same background. Please don’t let anyone notice before I change it.
6. HTML Code.
HTML was Law. If you were good at HTML your friends probably made you help them re-do their profile. If you were bad at HTML you could probably still manage to <i>italicize</i> the quotes on your selfies. Regardless of your skill level, you always felt accomplished when you turned stuff like <b>into fancy text</b>. OMG, look at that! I'm like a freaking web designer.
7. Selfie folders
Before they were dubbed selfies, they existed inside a folder titled "ME" or something of the sort, and they always had lyric quotes that were spruced up with HTML code that totally described your life at the moment. You usually posed in the classic mirror pic stance or held your camera directed above your head and looked upward.
This was the folder dedicated to your narcissism, but we didn’t see a problem with it then. Nowadays a folder dedicated to photos of yourself wouldn’t just be annoying, but you would be considered self-absorbed. Why would you not want to scroll through 27 mirror pics of me?
