I heard about this the other day, as an author mentioned on her mailing list that her MySpace blog had apparently been replaced by someone else’s music files. It was part of a deliberate change to make MySpace more “modern”:
MySpace, the Justin Timberlake-owned social network that refuses to die, is back yet again with a new desktop interface — and minus several years of users’ blogs and comments.
Blogs don’t form part of the new MySpace — sorry, Myspace, they’ve dropped the capital S — and neither do home pages full of pinned videos and user comments.
It’s all about music streaming and discovery, much to the chagrin of loyal users who’ve seen years of blogging disappear at a stroke as the platform narrows its focus.
[. . .]
Myspace might not lament the loss of users who only came back to read their own postings, but it highlights an interesting point about all social media platforms. What you post can vanish at any time, and emotion-laden
rantscontent remains available solely at the whim of the site owner — which could surprise a generation brought up to expect everything on-demand.Myspace could relent; there’s no indication that the content has been binned, and backups could be dispatched to customers wanting to leaf though their digital past. But that’s not part of the future — if, indeed, Myspace still has a future.
