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This is Later with Lee Matthews,
The Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear

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weekday afternoons on the Drive. Joe
McNeil has covered technology for over a decade.

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She's the author of a book called
Lurking, How a Person Became a

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User, and her new podcast,
which can be heard on the iHeartRadio app

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and everywhere you get podcasts, is
called Main Accounts. The Story of MySpace,

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Joanna, I cringe. I don't
know whether to be impressed or horrified.

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There's an entire generation of people out
there who don't even know nor have

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experienced MySpace. Oh. I mean, you can't blame them. It was

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a flip in history, and if
you're quite young, you might not remember,

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but I hope if you are curious
you will check out this podcast,

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especially people who might not have been
even alive when it was sounded. This

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was the baby brother of all social
media, wasn't it. Oh? I

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love that phrasing. It really was. And it was this scrappy baby brother,

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you know it. It was the
punk kid. It had the emo

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bangs and also like this uh rock
and roll heart uh and definitely gotten into

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some trouble. But I think one
thing you'll find with my Space. Uh,

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looking over this history is how much
of life today life through the internet,

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These experiences that are quite common today. It started on my Space.

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Well, let's get back to the
beginning. How did my Space begin?

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Because this was long before Zuckerberg there
was this was long before Basis, This

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was long before all those guys,
you know it was about it was a

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couple of years before that. It's
a little tricky to say it when when

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it started in two thousand and three
and uh the company was co founded by

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UH, Chris to Wolfs and Tom
Anderson, and they were working inside a

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company and they noticed a lot of
activity on other online other online platforms,

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and they thought, oh, this
looks really cool. Why don't we do

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this here? And they reached out
their friends. They this was a company

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that did a lot of marketing,
so having some people's emails was good for

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a marketing company, getting emails from
log and identities UM, and it just

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took off, like I don't think
any of them expected that it would rocket

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to um mass attention the way it
did. Joan McNeil, host of the

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podcast Main accounts, The story of
my Space is joining us. So when

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they got this thing going. Did
they realize what they had on their hands

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or were they just just trying to
explore a new means of communication. I

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would say a little bit of both. I mean, certainly they were ambitious,

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but the hidden element was how could
this scale the way it did?

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And you know, like with online
communities in the nineties, they were very

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niche, like you would sign up
for you know, if you had an

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all account, maybe you'd go to
a community for people who love horseback riding

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or they love the bad metallic orsonthing
like that. You know, you look

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for something very specific and sign that
community and keep in touch with that community.

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With my Space, it was much
broader and you could see people's faces.

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That was the other change. All
of a sudden, in about two

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thousand and three, people were getting
broadband internet. It wasn't as slow as

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dial up, so you could upload
photos of yourself, You could show your

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identity to the world. You could
show kind of curated identity of yourself,

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and people were sharing that that real
that I mean real, And I would

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say a little bit quotation marks because
you were definitely a lot of people on

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by suits group definitely staging their identity. But they you could connect the person

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to the profile page. Well,
well you also right away began reading about

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people addicted to their MySpace and going
nuts when they didn't get enough traffic.

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Oh yeah, that was definitely the
case. And I mean what one area

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where it was definitely the case was
the very young users, because you could

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be as young as thirteen years old. Officially, my Space said the age

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one was thirteen, So you've had
very young users who didn't have a lot

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of parental supervision. Because again this
was it was a mass platform, but

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I was still youth oriented. And
when you think about thirteen year olds mixing

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in a place with much of twenty
five year olds, that's that's where a

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lot of the trouble showed up.
And we are talking to the producer and

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host of Main Accounts The Story of
MySpace, a podcast you can hear everywhere

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you get podcast including the iHeartRadio app
Joanne McNeil, and um, did they

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right away? Did they? Did
they realize they could monetize this or was

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that ultimately the failure? I think
that's the area that you know nowadays we

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hear about things like surveillance capitalism,
that you trade your data for free use

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of services. This conversation just was
not happening when my Space launched, and

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they were you know, I think
they had a sense of selling ads against

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activity, but I saw in my
research that they just weren't even really collecting

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their data in certain cases, like
they they didn't have a sense of of

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the value of the of the various
user data necessarily or you know, it

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was just something that the the mindset
and at this point in time was just

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like, okay, well, well, you know, there were still expectations

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of privacy for these users. There
were still expectations that you know, you're

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not going to like have this stile
with everybody's age and taste and everything and

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sell that to advertisers. That practice
just was not the case as it is

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with the big platforms today. No, it took this Lee's ball of Zuckerberg

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to figure that out. That's all
my words, not yours, My words,

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not yours, Joe and McNeil of
main accounts the story of MySpace,

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and ultimately nothing went away faster it
seems, Oh yeah, and it is.

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It was kind of quite a shock
for the people who had built their

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lives on my Space. I'm thinking
specifically of musicians. You loved my Space

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for the opportunity to share tracks.
And when you think about it as a

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music of or you know, finding
new music can be can be tricky.

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And if you have this opportunity,
you see a band, they seem like

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their their their taste looks like it
matches with your taste. All you need

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to do is press a button on
their profile page and you hear their track

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and you can give them a chance. And so this opportunity for musicians to

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find to find fans, for fans
to keep up with your musicians, that

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that was that felt like a major
loss. It wasn't the sand as being

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able to just jump to another platform
like Facebook. Facebook was, you know,

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Facebook had a lot more rules and
my Space was that a lot of

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the creativity came out of how free
wheeling it was. My main accounts.

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The story of my Space is the
podcast. Joan McNeil is the host.

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And here's a philosophical question for you, because you've really got into the nuts

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and bolts of the birth of social
media when you when you when you birth

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to this podcast, has social media
changed American society for the good or for

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the bad? Oh? I mean, this is the question for the ages,

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and I'm pointed it's going to take
it in the space of it's a

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little bit of both, and I
think there are elements of social media where

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people have found like communities, sound
sound love, found found close friends,

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found people that they wouldn't otherwise have
in their lives, and that's been an

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incredible experience. But at the same
time, these are social spaces like any

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other, and you need to have
um you need you need supported communities,

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you need moderators, you need to
have like a community that make sure that

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everyone is safe and feels respected there, and some of these platforms are not

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so great at that. Main accounts
the story of my space. The podcast

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from Joanne McNeil can be heard on
the iHeartRadio app and everywhere you get podcasts.

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Joe and McNeil, thanks for joining
us and we will be listening to

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your podcast. Oh thank you so
much for having me. Thanks for listening

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to Later with Lee Matthews, the
Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen

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to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from
five to seven and iHeart Media Presentation