Not MySpace Anymore!

I can't even remember the last time I logged on to my MySpace account, so I decided to check it out just now. I had a picture in my mind of what I remember the homepage and my profile looking like, and I was shocked by how different the format is these days. Then again, I am not too surprised that MySpace has tried to revamp itself. The new MySpace seems to incorporate aspects of both Twitter and Facebook that completely transform the entire feel of this social networking site. There are tons of updates on celebrities on my homepage now and hardly anything about my MySpace friends. Very bizarre.

Reflecting on the original days of MySpace this is what I remember:
-The amount of photos you could have started out at about 12 and (while I was still on the site) grew to about 24...now you can create albums like on Facebook
-->Before this was an option, people would post pictures in the Blog section of MySpace
-There was a forum any of your friends could post in. I remember being obsessed with the surveys and posting them constantly in my Freshman year of high school. This is also where people would announce their new "Default pic" and ask for comments. I actually think the forum is a very cool aspect of MySpace when used properly. When it is used for new picture announcements and chain mail, though, it can be quite annoying.
-Top Friends. If there wasn't enough petty drama in my early years of high school, MySpace made it even more ridiculous. Originally you could sort your top 8 friends, and eventually using different coding you could have much more than that. I understand the use of having the pages you are most likely to look at and comment on most easily accessible; however, it would have been much better if your top friends were private and only displayed on your homepage not your profile. This caused too many fights among friends over each others rankings in the group.
-You could change the background and look of your page which was really fun. I loved doing this to my own page, but some people's pages just looked absolutely ridiculous and were much harder to read.
-You could have a song on your profile. This was another fun aspect to MySpace that I actually miss.

Eventually I discovered Facebook and would check both, but after a while I only used Facebook and my MySpace account collected dust for some three of four years. These days I imagine MySpace is used mostly by bands looking to be discovered and...I really don't know who else. Not a single one of my friends uses MySpace and I suspect at this point it might be a regional thing. Perhaps MySpace is huge in other countries now, but it is certainly not prominent among anyone I know. I must say, though, MySpace was certainly a respectable original social networking site, and I almost feel bad that it has sort of fallen off the map among American teens. At least it seems that it has.

Although I am sure our good friend Tom is doing just fine. =)