Ready to feel old? Instagram’s new feature is a Myspace throwback.
Tom Anderson, cofounder of Myspace in 2007. He’s big into crypto now, FYI.
Did you just feel that? That was the chill up your spine of the ghost of a side-swept bangs in a mirror selfie taken with a Canon Powershot.
Instagram has a new feature where you can add a song to play at the top of your profile. Like, you know … Myspace.
The feature was announced on Thursday and will be used by Sabrina Carpenter to promote her latest single, “Taste,” starting Friday.
For millennials, this may feel like a real throwback to the MySpace days, when picking the right song to play on your profile felt incredibly important.
(It also may remind them of another unpleasant experience of the old internet — auto-playing music.)
Those of us who were here for the first round of selecting just the right emo song to play on our profiles might not be so excited to do it again.
But there’s some good indications that younger people — those who were too young to be on Myspace in the 2000s — have a strange nostalgia for it.
The new app Noplace has been a surprise hit with teens and Gen Z this summer, topping the App Store charts. (“No place” like “My space,” get it?)
The app is like a text-based Myspace, where you can customize your profile with favorite songs and movies, post to a friend’s “wall,” and, most crucially, pick your top 10 friends.
I’ve been trying out Noplace, and I have to sadly cede that I’m just too old for it. Usually when there’s a buzzy new app, I can count on a few of my friends and contacts in the text industry to be on it to try it out. But with Noplace, I couldn’t find anyone I knew (except for blogging pioneer and tech executive Anil Dash, who is always everywhere).
There’s a function where you can see public posts from other people, but I got the sense that many of the people were probably under 18, and I felt like it would be weird to try and interact with them.
But most importantly, it just didn’t feel that fun for me to lovingly curate a profile. I used to love filling out a profile like this, showing off my impeccable taste and great jokes. Now? I’m tired. Maybe you just have to still be 17 to enjoy this.
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Still, if Instagram wants to appeal to Gen Z — which it definitely does — then mining Myspace’s greatest hits isn’t exactly a bad idea.
