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MySpace launched in August 2003 and became the social network that swallowed the mid-2000s internet — where everyone's first friend was Tom. Top 8 rankings sparked drama, profile songs played on auto-load, and DIY HTML customization meant glitter graphics and autoplay music ruled. Bands broke careers there; it was the most-visited website in the US by 2006.
The social network that beat MySpace in Britain, sold to AOL for $850 million at the top, and got bought back by its own founders for $1 million five years later. America barely noticed Bebo; for a few years the UK and Ireland barely used anything else.
The image host that decorated the entire early internet — MySpace profiles, forum signatures, eBay listings. Photobucket's ten billion images were invisible infrastructure, right up until June 2017, when a paywall turned millions of embedded pictures into upgrade-nag placeholders all at once.