On the rise and fall of Social Media.
Thomas Anderson is an American technology entrepreneur and co-founder of the social networking website Myspace, which he founded in 2003 with Chris DeWolfe. He was later president of Myspace and a strategic adviser for the company.
The fuming around Elon destroying Twitter (Now X) made me thing back to how Social Media permeates our lives and what has come and gone.
Back in the wild west days of the internet tell me more Grandad? Myspace was a big thing - particularly for us budding musicians as you could post tracks and a profile and connect with other musicians.
Tom Anderson was often our first and default friend and people of a certain age will immediately recognize the fresh faced smiling guy from this photo.
Facebook came along and things became competitive. Tom sold Myspace at its peak and walked away into the sunset with a fortune but no where near as obscene a fortune as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or your other bond Villain of choice.
In July 2005, Myspace was acquired by News Corporation for $580 million;[7] in June 2006, it surpassed Yahoo and Google to become the most visited website in the United States.
Things went South rapidly and a lot of historical content was wiped/destroyed by a server infrastructure upgrade:
As of October 5, 2024, Myspace has still been placed in a read-only mode of sorts, as no new articles have been published since early 2022, but media uploads seem to be working now. MySpace’s official account has also sparked some new activity. However, most images on the site still seem to be broken, and existing songs also cannot be played.
My old band and a few things Rob and I recorded together or separately exist on there as unplayable electronic ghosts. Just titles remaining and dead links.
It reminds me of Ozymandius:
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819 edition
As for Tom, I found him interesting in that he walked away from it all at the point he did and apparently now lives a life traveling around with a camera and away from Social Media mostly.
Sometimes you can have enough money.
