What Happened to MySpace Tom?

Описание: Tom Anderson, better known online as MySpace Tom, was, for a brief period in the early 2000s, arguably the most popular man on the internet. Boasting over 200 million friends at the apex of MySpace’s popularity, Tom was everybody who signed up to use the site’s first, but hopefully not only, friend. So what is he doing now and why was he everyone’s friend?

To answer the latter, well, if you want to be everyone’s friend, helping to found the website is a good way to make that happen. Created in 2003, MySpace was a direct response to Friendster, an early social networking site that has since faded into obscurity, though at its peak had several million members and was turning down dozens of millions of dollar buyout offers from companies like Google.

In early 2003, while working for a company called eUniverse, Tom lamented that Friendster took a heavy-handed approach to so-called “Fakester” profiles belonging to people pretending to be fictional characters, or satirical accounts from people pretending to be celebrities, etc. Tom felt Friendster’s policy of summarily deleting these was a mistake, reasoning that the internet of all places should be a forum people felt comfortable expressing themselves in any way they chose. In a later interview, Tom waxed poetic about the nature of personal identity, musing, “Identity is provisional. Who we are is whom we choose to be at any given moment, depending on personality, whim, temperament or subjective need.”

This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout