October 27, 2025 - Dead Media

 Today we will talk about "dead media."  Here is a story you might not know, but is 100% true!!

MySpace was the first big social media website. It started in 2003 and quickly became popular, especially with young people. Users could make profiles, add friends, post updates, and share photos.

20 years ago, Myspace was the most visited social networking site in the world.

Because of its huge success, Myspace was sold to News Corporation in 2005 for $580 million. At the time, people thought it would keep growing forever!

But then Facebook came along. It was cleaner, simpler, and more organized. At first, in 2003 it was only for college students. You needed a university email. In the US, this was .edu. A "face book" itself used to be a real thing that universities would print and give to students that would tell a little bit about someone, so you could make friends more easily. It is the opposite of a  "year book" which is given out after school ends, and is full of memories. 

In 2006, Facebook opened to everyone. Slowly, millions of users began leaving Myspace and joining Facebook. This shift became known as “the great migration.”

Myspace tried to fight back by changing its design and focusing more on music and celebrities, but it was too late. By 2011, Facebook had completely taken over.  Many MySpace profiles were deleted or abandoned as people left.  After 2011, MySpace was sold to Justin Timberlake for $35 Million and was transformed into a music sharing site. It has changed owners a few times since then.

In 2019, Myspace admitted that it had lost over 12 years of user data, including millions of songs, photos, and blog posts. The loss had gone unnoticed for years, showing how far the site had fallen.

Today, Myspace still exists, but hardly anyone uses it. Since you can easy share your music on youtube, soundcloud and 100 other places (even if you have no talent) MySpace has become a dumping ground for no talent nobodies who make awful music, and corprate music (still awful) that forgot they still have a page there.

It is considered Dead Media, remembered mainly as a pioneer of early social media. 

It is not truly "dead" though. You can still visit the site, but it looks nothing like how people remember it. Other sites that are considered "dead" do not exist at all anymore. Unlike a magazine or TV show that ends, there is little or no trace of what some of these websites were. Some people think that is a problem, because we have no way of showing future generations what older Internet looked like.

In fact I could NOT find anything that shows what MySpace used to look like. There is ONE video I found where someone recreated it.

Nobody thought of trying to record it for someone to see later. It was also hard to record a computer screen 20 years ago anyway.

So for class today, please *TRY* to present us with a case of Dead Media that you remember. For this one time only, Non-English sources can be used, since if it existed 10-20 years ago, you probably did not understand English back then anyway. Please *TRY* to link sources from this dead media, though I understand it might not be possible in every case, and of course, write about it in 100 words or more.

MySpace gave everyone thier first friend to start with. Tom. He created the site.

Don't be sad for Tom. He has no friends these days, but has hundreds of millions of dollars instead!