2003: MySpace vs. Friendster in a Battle for Digital Natives

MySpace in September 2003, the month after its launch.

The term “digital native” was coined in 2001 by writer and teacher Marc Prensky, who wrote that “our students today are all 'native speakers' of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.” The rest of us are “digital immigrants,” which Prensky (who was in his mid-50s) defined as “not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives, become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology.”

Although digital immigrants have learned to adapt to the new environment, according to Prensky “they always retain, to some degree, their 'accent,' that is, their foot in the past.” He gives the example of “turning to the Internet for information second rather than first.” On the other hand, digital natives “are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging.” For this generation, which has “been networked most or all of their lives,” a new approach to education is needed, Prensky claims.

Whether or not the education system adapted in the rest of the aughts, I’m not qualified to say. But I know for sure that new forms of websites emerged that catered directly to these "digital natives." One of them was MySpace, which launched in August 2003 as “an online community that lets you meet your friends' friends.”

MySpace homepage when it launched in 2003.

The origin of MySpace is a curious mix of internet corporatism and digital native exploration. Its two main founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, were employees of a company called eUniverse, which was a network of low-brow online entertainment properties. In a December 2001 profile in the New York Times, eUniverse was characterised as a scrappy, somewhat seedy, dot-com survivor:

“Aimed at women aged 25 to 54, its network of sites are cheap, corny, crass and profitable. Its advertisers are more likely to sell debt refinancing and online diets than cars or perfume.”

MySpace, September 2003: "Invite your friends".

The owner of eUniverse was Brad Greenspan, whose strategy was to buy up small online businesses like flowgo.com, which the Times wrote “offers goofy animated e-mail greeting cards.” Other, similar, sites bought by eUniverse included BigFatBaby.com, DebsFunPages.com and JustSayWow.com — all were hokey sites that asked for your email address and promised to send you “free fun pages,” as “Deb” put it (there was no surname listed on the site). This strategy enabled eUniverse to harvest millions of email addresses, which it monetised primarily by sending adverts to.

Debs Fun Pages, one of MySpace's stable mates at eUniverse; August 2003 screenshot.

In Julia Angwin’s book “Stealing MySpace,” she describes Chris DeWolfe running a division within eUniverse that dealt in spyware, “software that surreptitiously monitors Web surfers’ movements and bombards them with related ads.” DeWolfe and his colleague Tom Anderson had sold their email marketing company, ResponseBase, to eUniverse in late-2002, and spent 2003 trying various things to expand their influence within eUniverse. One project was to create a replica of a trendy social network called Friendster.

“His team had thrown together its copycat site in just a few months,” wrote Angwin. “There was no reason to believe that MySpace would be able to stand out in the crowded field of Friendster rip-off sites. Still, if it worked, DeWolfe's twenty-five-person Internet division would be saved. If it flopped, he would lose control of his fiefdom at eUniverse.”

So it was that MySpace launched on August 15, 2003: a copycat site in a spyware-focused division of an internet business that sent millions of emails per day.

"MySpace is for everyone" (although it helps if you're attractive). September 2003 screenshot.

Friendster

Friendster, which had launched publicly in March 2003, wasn’t the first social networking site on the internet. Classmates.com had started in 1995, Six-Degrees.com the following year, and LiveJournal began in 1999 as a kind of blogging spin on the idea. But Friendster was the first of this kind of site to gain major traction in Silicon Valley. It was initially pitched as “a new way to meet people” for dating purposes, “or making new friends.”

Although it wasn’t strictly a dating site, Friendster’s FAQ made it clear that this was its primary purpose. “Should I use Friendster if I am not single?,” read one of the questions. “Sure, you can use Friendster just to make friends, or to help your single friends meet people,” stated the reply. Another question rhetorically asked, “How is Friendster different from other online dating services?”

Friendster, April 2003.

DeWolfe and Anderson had joined Friendster, but quickly spotted an opportunity. Most obviously, Friendster was slow and plagued by technical issues — mostly due to its rapid growth over 2003. But also, Friendster had cracked down on so-called “Fakesters,” people who tried to use the site with anonymous or assumed user names. MySpace had no such restrictions when it launched in August 2003. As Angwin pointed out in her book, this made the process of “friending” fundamentally different to Friendster:

“On Friendster, because people used their real identities, they tended to friend people they knew in real life. On MySpace, where fake identities flourished, friending did not imply that the two people knew each other.”

Not only that, but Friendster restricted what you could even see on the site. As a later New York Times article put it, “users at Friendster could view only the profiles of those on a relatively short chain of acquaintances,” whereas on MySpace, “anybody could look at anyone else’s profile.”

Friendster profile, September 2003.

MySpace Growth Spurt

MySpace grew quickly. By October, it had over one hundred thousand users. It was still small fry compared to Friendster, which had around three million registered users by the fall of 2003. But MySpace users were clearly having more fun than Friendster’s users. Partly this was because MySpace allowed users to edit the HTML in their profiles — which meant they could add colourful backgrounds and fonts, and use images and GIFs like on Geocities.

Tom Anderson wrote in an October blog post that he was “glad to see how creative people are with HTML in their profiles.” He added a note of caution, though. “Be careful to code properly. If you don't close your tags, you'll botch the page and won't be able to view your friends and comments.”

FAQ from October 2003, encouraging the use of HTML (and discouraging nude pictures!).

It’s notable that MySpace came from an LA-based company, eUniverse. While the Silicon Valley based Friendster tried to impose various technological constraints onto its users, MySpace adopted a more laidback, Venice Beach-like approach. You can do whatever you want with your profile and make friends with whomever you choose — that was the MySpace way.

It was this laid back approach, combined with the ability to customise your profile, that attracted young people — digital natives — to MySpace. In particular, teenage girls. As Angwin put it:

“In their quest to keep in touch with their friends around the clock, teenage girls were among the first groups to begin actively blogging and posting photos online. They wanted more from the Internet than just techie features—they wanted to express themselves to their friends.”

Cutting and pasting blocks of HTML into MySpace came more naturally to teenagers than it did to digital immigrants. Indeed, a big reason why the web itself became popular is the ability to copy existing web designs and reuse for your own purposes — it was as simple as clicking “View Source” in your browser and copying and pasting the code you needed. Even distinguished web designers like Jeffrey Zeldman practiced this and encouraged other designers to as well. More importantly, digital natives just assumed this was the default way to act on the web.

A 2001 article about 'view source' on the web design site, A List Apart (screenshot: April 2003); by 2003, this philosophy was filtering into the mainstream partly thanks to MySpace.

While there were other factors in the subsequent rise of MySpace and fall of Friendster, in a way it came down to which site more suited the proclivities of digital natives. Friendster didn’t allow HTML customisation, but MySpace did. It was obvious which of these two social networks a teenager would choose.