MySpace Tom

2003

Date: August 2003 onward · Place: myspace.com · Figures: Tom Anderson, co-founder · Chris DeWolfe, co-founder · Tags: Social, Default Friend 01. Everyone's First Friend MySpace launches in August 2003 with a default behaviour: every new user automatically becomes friends with Tom Anderson, the co-founder, whose smiling photograph at a desk in a white T-shirt appears on every new profile. By 2005 Tom has more friends than any person in human history (peak roughly 250 million). Tom is the era's first parasocial figure produced by a default-on social-platform mechanic. He is everyone's first friend by definition. He answers some support emails personally. 02. He Sells, Retires, Travels MySpace sells to News Corp in July 2005 for $580 million; Tom personally clears around $30 million. He retires, takes up landscape photography, posts genuinely accomplished work to Instagram for two decades. The figure of MySpace Tom remains a recurring meme: the man who left social media and won. Tom is the proto-template for every later platform-founder-as-mascot: Kevin Systrom, Evan Spiegel, even Zuckerberg's awkward congressional hearings. None of them get to retire. Sources • Wired, 'Tom Anderson Has Left the Building' (2009) • Forbes, 'How MySpace Tom Cashed Out at the Top' (2011) • Tom Anderson's Instagram (@myspacetom)