Today I visited Myspace. Yes, Myspace, or as it is called today’s hip new english, “My_______.”

Remember it?

Remember My Chemical Romance playing amid a falling virtual snowstorm? And peace-signed, duck-faced selfies?

Today I visited, and today I come back to let you know what I found.

It was interesting to go back and see the first social media website our generation had the pleasure to play around in. Memory lane tells me to expect pages and pages of clashing colors and scrolling hyperlinks, something that seemed completely and utterly unappealing. Unreadable text and weird tiled picture backgrounds were the norm in this barren wasteland of the 90’s.

But, they were popular because they were first. They were the victors of the social media battle then because there was no one else on the field. Despite their poorly designed idea of letting users copy and paste in whichever cool little widget on their page and despite their lack of privacy, they were what everyone used.

Even by 2008, they were still the leading social media platform — valued at a whooping $12 million. But even then, there was a tiny little competitor on the horizon, peaking its little blue  “f” logo into college students lives. And soon, by April 19, 2008, Facebook officially achieved a greater Alexa rating than Myspace. The next 4 years, Myspace slowly became the platform hipster indie bands used to distribute their music.

When I visited the site today, Myspace told me that I could now connect it to Facebook.

That’s all ancient history. It’s been four years since Myspace — an eternity for the internet landscape. Myspace today is nothing, forgotten by the former thirteen year olds that used it once upon a time and unheard of by today’s thirteen year olds.

A quick Wikipedia search gives many reasons why Myspace failed. Perhaps, it suggests, Myspace focused too much on music while Facebook focused more on the social aspects. Perhaps, Myspace forced too many ads onto it’s pages, causing the already ugly pages to completely lose to Facebook’s shiny new interface. Perhaps Myspace did not innovate enough. Perhaps it simply began to seem too hostile an environment, with the pornography accusations against it and the constant spamming.

This social network analyzing is a very inexact science, and the fall of Myspace is still somewhat hazy. Most likely it’s a combination of all the factors listed above.

But one has to wonder if the saying holds true. Will history really repeat itself, even on the internet? It’s been four years since Myspace but it’s also been four years since Facebook rose to popularity. Facebook is just about as old as Myspace was when it fell and the falling FB stock prices betray the lack of confidence in their staying ability.

I’m not saying that Facebook will fall, but, if it does, can we use Myspace’s example to predict it?

(to be continued)