Thousands of former Myspace users, who long ago grew up, got Facebook and forgot that Myspace was ever a thing, got an unsettling message from the undead social network over the weekend. The site is still around, like some sort of digital zombie. And it has billions of pictures from a time before the Internet knew better.
“Your Photos are Back!” reads the subject line of the unintentionally ominous marketing e-mail, before going on to promise and/or threaten “the good, the rad, and the what were you thinking.” Entrusting our personal photos to an unforgetting Internet? What were we thinking, indeed?
Myspace insists that the campaign isn’t blackmail; the company merely reached out to an untold number of “current and past users,” as a spokesperson for MySpace said, to “re-engage them through a personalized experience.” But however the company spins the e-mails, it’s hard to see them as anything other than a once-great network’s latest, most desperate gasp for relevance.
There’s still a web site called “Myspace,” but it does almost none of the things that it did when you last used it, around 2008 or so. In 2011, the site was bought by a California company called Specific Media, and two years later, Specific relaunched Myspace as a kind of streaming radio service/music news site/social network for music fans. Complete with a $20 million ad campaign.
(Image Source: iCLIPART)