Myspace came before Facebook and it was a big hit all the sudden. There had been GeoCities and webrings that were getting popular but a person had to code those up in HTML to make anything that looked halfway decent compared to the base templates that looked like a kindergarten kid’s colored construction paper project. Myspace popped up all the sudden and made it about the content instead of HTML. When everyone joined MySpace, they quickly had Tom as their first follower. It did not present Tom as one of the founders of MySpace (that I recall). It was a magical time when some random person you had never met wanted to be your friend. At least that is how it seemed to a dumb ~13yo. Internet wasn’t really a mainstream thing back then. It was only just getting adopted by a larger audience in places like school computer labs. The labs had existed for a long time already, but connecting a hundred or so color Macintosh cubes up to the internet at the same time, in a public grade school, that was novel. There were also magazines that gave away AOL floppies or later CDs that would allow dialup connections to the internet for free. This was the era of Tom.
When you signed up for a MySpace account back in the day, Tom, the founder, was your first friend, added automatically. If memory serves, you couldn’t remove him, either.
Care to share the legend of Tom? That’s a bit of internet lore I’ve missed.
Myspace came before Facebook and it was a big hit all the sudden. There had been GeoCities and webrings that were getting popular but a person had to code those up in HTML to make anything that looked halfway decent compared to the base templates that looked like a kindergarten kid’s colored construction paper project. Myspace popped up all the sudden and made it about the content instead of HTML. When everyone joined MySpace, they quickly had Tom as their first follower. It did not present Tom as one of the founders of MySpace (that I recall). It was a magical time when some random person you had never met wanted to be your friend. At least that is how it seemed to a dumb ~13yo. Internet wasn’t really a mainstream thing back then. It was only just getting adopted by a larger audience in places like school computer labs. The labs had existed for a long time already, but connecting a hundred or so color Macintosh cubes up to the internet at the same time, in a public grade school, that was novel. There were also magazines that gave away AOL floppies or later CDs that would allow dialup connections to the internet for free. This was the era of Tom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson
Thanks. Was fun to read that. The early days of the Internet were truly magical.
When you signed up for a MySpace account back in the day, Tom, the founder, was your first friend, added automatically. If memory serves, you couldn’t remove him, either.
My guess is that every MySpace user had to have at least 1 follower and they resolved that bug by making the owner your first friend.
Oh wow! What a quirky feature.
Yuup. Not sure quite about the removal part, though.
iirc, you 100% could, but basically nobody did, because Tom was a bro. Everyone’s bro.