MySpace returns: ‘SpaceHey’ brings social media back to its roots
SpaceHeyCould Myspace be back? Social media platform SpaceHey has arrived after a teenager decided to rebuild the iconic website from the ground up.
In 2003, Tom Anderson and a group of coworkers at the time created Myspace, one of the Internet’s first social media platforms. It quickly gained popularity, growing to a peak of over 115 million users, even outranking Google for the most visited website in its time.
Once Facebook came into the picture and started gaining popularity, Myspace quickly lost momentum as users were switching over to the new social media platform.
On November 18, 2020, a German teenager by the name of “An” announced a new development project called SpaceHey, where he will focus on building a fully functional version of Myspace.
SpaceHeySpaceHey clones Myspace
Within weeks of his initial announcement, An launched the first version of the website. Soon after, he announced even more updates to the website in his profile blog post.
While the site launched with its Myspace throwback profiles, friends list, and blog posts, he explained: “I’ve added some new features yesterday and today: The biggest ones are Blog Comments and the ability to Report Profiles, Comments, and Blog Entries.”
According to the same blog from the creator, over two-thousand users joined the website within days of launch. Thanks to a boost of nostalgia from social media almost a year after its initial launch, the website has grown to over 270,000 users according to a tweet from the official Twitter page.
Twitter reacts to SpaceHey
After slowly growing over the course of a year, news of the Myspace look-a-like has spread across social media. The viral spread has gotten the attention of many users who were fans of the iconic website as they tweet pictures of their profiles with the hashtag “SpaceHey.”
Other users have even posted pictures of the website’s terms, noting that there are no algorithms, tracking, or personalized ads.
This alone makes @spacehey seem awesome. Re-doing Myspace is icing on the cake. I REALLY hope this is legit pic.twitter.com/6x5KGaQlVx
— Rae The Writer (@WriteAsRae) November 12, 2021
Other users have even made references to the ability to customize your own Myspace layout, as it is also a feature on SpaceHey: “Myspace being back means I got my job back as an HTML coder.”
https://twitter.com/AYYEJOYCE/status/1459005527401242632?s=20
It’s really unlikely that SpaceHey has the ability to dethrone Facebook as the top social media platform, or even if that’s what the creator has set out to do. For now, we just have to decide who our top-8 will be.