In Angwin’s telling, the team’s mistake was what “allowed users to build colorful backgrounds and wallpaper and load them onto their MySpace pages. However, while rewriting MySpace, Harriman and Nguyen made a major mistake-they failed to block users from adding their own HTML and CSS to their profile pages. In response, the team paid developers Gabe Harriman and Toan Nguyen to rewrite the entire site in Adobe’s ColdFusion. This left the remaining team with a site written in Perl, which nobody else at the company was familiar with. As Julia Angwin explains in her aforementioned 2009 book Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Site in America, MySpace’s lead developer quit one month after the site launched in 2003. The code-friendly nature of MySpace was actually borne out a mistake. But as the most popular of the bunch by far, with over 110 million active users at its peak, MySpace was the standard-bearer, and the one that left the biggest legacy behind. MySpace wasn’t the only platform that allowed this kind of expression through code-Xanga, Tumblr, Pitas, and plenty of other platforms allowed users to customize their profiles with HTML and CSS. With a cursor depicting a favorite movie character, or font color combinations that recalled a favorite sports team’s colors, users could use every pixel on the profiles to set themselves apart. In a 2009 New York Times review of the book Stealing MySpace,Michael Agger described MySpace as the “product of striving, nighttime Los Angeles, where you go to be famous, to be something new.” Its allure was in allowing users-the vast majority of whom were teenagers and young adults-to invent and express a three-dimensional, digital version of themselves, from their profile photo, to the eight friends they considered closest, down to the font and background images on their profile pages.Ĭhanging the styling of your MySpace profile was a way to distinguish yourself from your friends. So let’s look back on what made MySpace so code-friendly, and on how that friendliness eventually played a part in the site’s downfall. The flat-out necessity of having a customized profile brought forth an entire ecosystem of theme sellers and HTML tutorial writers, early pioneers in their own right who commodified their coding knowledge while convincing millions that writing code was something they could do too. But of all the features that made MySpace the cultural sensation that it was, the ability to style a profile page with HTML and CSS might have left the biggest footprint behind.įor tens of millions of people, tinkering with anchor and style tags to personalize a MySpace profile was an introduction to code as a means to solving a problem, to expressing something about yourself, or to just experimenting and seeing what happened. the top 8, auto-playing music, and, of course, Tom. Since the site’s demise nearly ten years ago, certain totems of the MySpace experience have stuck in our collective memories-e.g. And for many members of that same generation, MySpace was a gateway to another inescapable part of modern life-writing code. For an entire generation, MySpace was a gateway to the addictive social networking platforms that are now a ubiquitous feature of our lives.
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