From “a place for friends”
to “Featured Content on Myspace”

The October 2003 page fits on one screen with room to spare. On the left, the box says With myspace you can: above its four bullet points and three pale blue figures.

On the right, three steps: Step 1: Create a Profile, Step 2: Invite Your Friends, Step 3: Meet Your Friends’ Friends. Under them, in blue, See How You’re Connected! Then two buttons, SIGN UP! and LOGIN.

Myspace had gone live only that August, according to Julia Angwin’s book about the company (reported).^[1] The logo already carries the line a place for friends. It stays in the logo until the 2010 redesign.

Try to read this page as text and almost nothing is left. Every sentence on it is a picture. A text-only reading of the capture returns the browser title, Myspace.com, and seven footer links, from About MySpace to Contact MySpace. The code has one more detail: a script that sends visitors without cookies to ./index.cfm?Cookie=0, a ColdFusion page. The oldest copy of myspace.com in the archive, from February 2003, is a single line: Welcome to Myspace!

By December 2005 the box has become a portal. A navy header carries a new logo, three black figures and myspace®, with a search box that can look through The Web or MySpace. Below it runs a menu of 14 links, from Home and Browse to Classifieds and SignUp.

The first thing in the main column is a pale orange box called Cool New People: two members’ first names and photos. We blurred the photos, here and on the next three homepages. Under the box sit the empty MySpace Music and MySpace Specials panels, then four blue boxes that will stay on the homepage until 2008. The first one says Join for free, and view profiles, connect with others, blog, rank music, and much more!

Five months earlier News Corp had agreed to buy Intermix Media, Myspace’s owner, for $580 million.^[2] The footer just says ©2003-2005 MySpace.com All Rights Reserved.

The menu has a ghost. Between the comment markers in the code sits a link called Rank, pointing to rank.myspace.com and an action named RateImage.rate. It is switched off on this page. On Tom’s profile from March 2005, below, the same menu still shows Rank between Invite and Mail.

The July 2006 page is busier in every corner. The logo now reads myspace.com in white on blue. A row of search tabs offers Web | MySpace | People | Music | Blogs | Video | Film. Over the main column, a directory lists twelve sections in four columns, four of them marked with a red NEW!: Books, Comedy, Movies and MySpaceIM.

Music takes the best spots. A banner for The Bronx says watch now!, another promotes Ice Cube, and the MySpace Music box offers the world premiere of Avenged Sevenfold’s Seize The Day, exclusively on MySpace! On the right, the Videos box is presented by cingular and shows a clip called Choppy Landing: Airplane makes a not so smooth landing.

The week Hitwise measured ended three days after this capture.^[5] The page’s code still lists rate pics among its search keywords, and a comment marks the stylesheet as *** VERSION 2.0 CSS ***. The browser title has changed too, from Myspace.com to plain MySpace, with a capital S.

In February 2007 a new label sits beside the search box: powered by Google. It comes from a deal signed the summer before, when Google agreed to pay News Corp at least $900 million in shared ad revenue to be MySpace’s search and ad provider.^[6]

The top of the main column now belongs to video. A box called Cool New Videos carries a counter, 41,030 uploaded today!, and four members’ clips with their titles: Tusken Sun, Hard CORE Pug, Laser Show and Seduce a Cowgirl. The directory carries Jobs and TV On Demand, both marked NEW!

Fall Out Boy are in the music slot. The blurb calls them one of the most popular bands on Myspace and says the band is guest-curating the music home page for its new album Infinity on High.

Below them, MySpace Specials asks Have what it takes to be considered for an Emmy award? for the Broadband Emmy Awards. Cool New People stays in the right column under the login box, as in 2006, with three more members’ photos, blurred here. In the code, every box is now a numbered placement in a content system, with names like videotoday, uservideo1 and splash_graybox.

On February 5, 2008, the whole homepage sits inside a vitaminwater ad. A giant red bottle fills the left side. On the right, Shaquille O’Neal in a red-and-white checked jacket holds a bottle, above the line try it... it works for shaq. The page in the middle is the same blue MySpace, now with a black menu bar.

The bottle’s label is readable in the full-page view. Among its small print: vitamins + water = all you need.

Inside the frame the counters keep climbing. Cool New Videos now says 75,195 uploaded today!, against 41,030 a year earlier. The directory has grown to 24 sections with icons, including Grade My Prof., Ringtones, Weather and a new Celebrity. A box under the login asks you to Find Your Friends on MySpace by checking Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL contacts. MySpace Specials promotes a Secret Stand-Up show: HARLAND WILLIAMS in SAN JOSE!

The four blue boxes from 2005 are still at the bottom, word for word, except for a stray > after See pix, read blogs, and more! The footer has a new link, MySpace Latino.

By July 2009 the homepage is lighter and calmer. The browser title spells out the old tagline, MySpace | A Place for Friends, and the top of the page is one advert: Jeremih, with LISTEN & BUY HIS SELF-TITLED ALBUM for ONLY $2.99 through Amazon MP3. The album had come out the day before this capture (reported).^[7]

Below it a panel called Today on MySpace carries the date, Wednesday, Jul 1, 2009, and a link to Check your Horoscope.

Its row of tabs ends with Celebrity Updates, and the panel reads like a status feed: six famous members, each with a short post and a mood. Kellie Pickler writes finally got my Starbucks. ok. I can now start my day. xo, mood animated. George Lopez announces his HBO special, mood accomplished.

For May 2009, comScore counted Facebook ahead of MySpace in US monthly visitors for the first time, by a hair: 70.278 million to 70.255 million, per TechCrunch.^[8] The menus change too. Find Friends now has its own place in the main menu, and the footer adds Developers and Sitemap.

One page on Myspace changed less than the homepage: myspace.com/tom. Co-founder Tom Anderson was added to every new account as its first friend, so the friend counter on his profile rose with almost every new account.^[9] We opened four archived visits from 2005 to 2010.

Tom’s own 2005 bio tells you how to get rid of him: If you don’t want me to be, click “Edit Friends” and remove me! The same bio warns that his friends list won’t show all 11,000,000 people. It was bogging down the system, so it showed only 40.

The rest of the profile ages in real time. In March 2005 a black-bordered box says Tom is in your extended network and he is 29 years old. By September 2007 he is 31 and the headline reads Tom is working on myspace plans! In January 2009, 33 and Tom happy new year, to you and yours :-). His interests shrink along the way: Dancing, Baseball, Weight Lifting and WWI Aviation are on the 2005 list and gone from the 2007 one, while History of Communism stays.

The January 2010 page has a new layout, a status feed (Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!, mood Unwrapping) and his full name in the title. A few weeks later Myspace stopped adding him to new accounts.^[9] We’ll visit him once more at the end.

The November 2010 homepage is dark from edge to edge. In the corner sits the new logo: my, then an underlined empty space, then a sideways BETA. Myspace had unveiled it in October.^[10] Its announcement explained the gap: The bracket in the logo represents a space where people can express themselves.^[11] The tagline is gone. On the right a white panel sells All your faves for free, with Free music • Free games • Free TV and a yellow Sign up free button.

The rest is a grid of tiles, and none of them is a friend. A counter says 3,157,440 people just shared what they’re into. above three strangers’ status updates, blurred here. Other tiles name a Popular game being played right now (Happy Aquarium) and count 105,488 people in Games right now. Under the sign-up button: Connect with Facebook.

February 2011 keeps the grid, with one change in the tab: the browser title now reads Myspace | Social Entertainment, lowercase s. The big counter is lower, 2,366,085. Celebrity accounts fill the status tiles (Usher, Britney Spears, Pink), and a news tile promises an Exclusive Message: Russell Simmons and President Barack Obama have something to tell you! In 2005 News Corp had paid $580 million for Myspace’s owner, Intermix.^[2] In June 2011 it sold Myspace itself for about $35 million.^[12]

In February 2012 a singer takes over the top of the page. Lana Del Rey’s face fills the left side, beside the words WE LOVE LANA DEL REY and SEE THE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW. The logo has changed again. The blank space is gone, and a plain white myspace sits in a black bar with Sign up, Login and four menu items: Music, Video, Games and Browse People.

Facebook gets more room. One banner says FACEBOOK CONNECT, and the login box offers Connect with Facebook. The page’s code explains what that button did: Myspace could pull your interests (like movies, music, and celebs) and public profile info (name, email, gender, birth date, and photo) from Facebook and add them to your Myspace profile. A vertical tab on the right edge says MYSPACE MUSIC PLAYER.

The rest reads like an entertainment site. Under Artist Radio the image labels list stations by genre: Portishead: Electronica, Mazzy Star: Alternative/Indie/Rock, Norah Jones: Jazz/Pop. The Entertainment News tiles are labeled with gossip such as Justin Bieber: Finally hosting SNL?

By March 2013 the same page carries a black banner across the top: Rebuilt. Redesigned. Reinvented. New.Myspace.com. Its image label is plainer, The new Myspace: Sign up now! The new site had opened as a public beta in January.^[13] In the tiles below, one image label for a Jamie Lidell interview has a typo nobody fixed: He doesn’t care about yoru gossip circle.

In June the new Myspace left beta,^[14] and the July 2013 homepage looks nothing like any page before it. It is black. Huge photos cover the screen, with Welcome to the neighborhood in thin white letters and a line under it: Discover, share and connect with culture, creativity, sound, images and people. A slim menu on the left lists Welcome, Featured, People and Music, and the tiles are featured profiles, each labeled with a name.

The move had a cost. The new Myspace cut members off from their old blogs, messages, comments and custom backgrounds, and reports at the time described upset users who had not been warned.^[15] TechCrunch cautioned that Myspace may have only cut off access to the old blog data, not deleted it (reported).

At the bottom runs a player bar with a new logo, a cluster of dots before myspace. Its message: Welcome to Myspace. Sign in to listen to music. Beside it, © 2013 Myspace LLC.

In June 2014 the browser title says what the page has become: Featured Content on Myspace. The welcome line in the code is now This Is Myspace, and the big photo belongs to a TV show: Watch the Series Premiere of 50 Cent’s ‘Power’. Starz had scheduled the premiere for June 7, six days after this capture,^[16] and the story’s summary in the code says you could stream the series premiere right now on Myspace.

The tiles are articles filed under column names such as SATURDAYS WITH SPEAK, THE SHUFFLE BOARD, WILCOX SESSIONS, EVERYBODY LOVES A LIST!. The code still has the tools of a social network. A hidden upload window offers photo filters called Nostalgia, Hazy Days, Orange, Love and Lomo, and the player bar’s message in the code is now Welcome to Myspace. Just start typing to find music.

February 2015 leads with Remembering the Bud Bowl and Its Lasting (Really) Pop Culture Legacy. From this year on, the copyright line in the code reads © 2014 Myspace LLC. In October 2026 it still does.

In February 2016 Lily James is on the cover, in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Ten days after this capture Time Inc. announced it would buy Viant, the ad company that owned Myspace.^[17]

The February 2018 cover is reality TV: Get an exclusive first look inside the Celebrity Big Brother house. Under the cover runs a menu of the magazine’s sections, and one of them is an old Myspace word. Next to NEWS, ARTIST OF THE DAY and Q&A sits TOP 8, the same name as the box of eight friends on Tom’s profile at the end of this story. Down the left side, under Help, Privacy and Terms, a gray line says who owns the page: A part of the People / Entertainment Weekly Network.

Our April 2019 still shows one slide of the cover slideshow: Billie Eilish on how she made the gruesome ‘When The Party’s Over’ video.

Two weeks before our capture, the loss made the news. Myspace had told users that, after a server migration, files uploaded more than three years earlier might no longer be available, and a message attributed to its data protection officer said there was no way to recover the lost data (reported).^[18]

They went online on April 1, 2019, the day of our capture, as the Internet Archive’s Myspace Dragon Hoard: over 1.3 terabytes, playable in a player called Hobbit.^[19]

February 2020 asks Are Iron Maiden working on a new album? In the corner a purple box called Connect with People suggests one profile: Avicii, Musician, DJ. The sidebar has gained a new link, Do-Not-Sell My Personal Information.

February 2022 looks like any year of the magazine: The Black Keys Reveal 2022 Tour Dates With Band of Horses on the first slide, music news below. Then the stories almost stop changing.

A year later, in February 2023, the first slide still announces Bikini Kill Detail 2022 Summer Tour. We checked nine captures from July 2022 to February 2025. The first slide changed only twice, and many stories under it stayed for years, while their read counters kept going up, so each capture is a fresh visit to a page whose headlines barely moved. A few autumn 2024 stories only turn up in February 2025. The Bikini Kill headline is still in the page’s code in July 2025.

By then new stories are back. The July 2025 first slide is Olivia Rodrigo, Robert Smith Find ‘Heaven’ At Glastonbury.

The October 2026 still shows the slide Taylor Swift Zeroes In On New Single, about a single due on September 25 (reported).^[20] It keeps the black left column and the player bar from 2014, now with a slideshow on top and rows of stories below. The player bar still says Welcome to Myspace. Just start typing to find music. The code keeps a sign-up form that offers to Connect me to people I follow on Twitter, and the people box in the code has a longer name, Date, Network, and Connect with People.

2003 · Friends2026 · Magazine

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The four promises of 2003, Find Old Friends and Meet New Friends among them, are long gone from the homepage. Tom’s profile still answers. In January 2025 it uses the black design of the new Myspace, with a photo across the screen and one line beside it: Former first friend; I’m not working for the company now, ya’all :-) His Top 8 is still there, two rows of squares under the bio.

In August 2026 Myspace’s owners, Tim and Chris Vanderhook, said they plan to relaunch it once more: We’re just waiting for the right time to do it.^[21] The homepage they would replace still has the dotted logo from 2013 and a copyright line from 2014.