For a few years in the mid-2000s, MySpace wasn't just a place to have a profile — it was a place to publicly rank your closest friends, in order, for everyone to see. That single feature, the "Top 8," generated more real-world social drama than almost anything else the early social web produced, and it happened almost by accident.
Built as a reaction to Friendster
MySpace was co-founded by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, launching in August 2003. It emerged partly as a direct response to an earlier, then-popular social network called Friendster, which had strict policies against fake names, "fakester" profiles, and other creative uses of the platform that its actual users seemed to enjoy. MySpace deliberately took a looser, more permissive approach — letting users pick usernames, customize the visual look of their profile page with their own HTML and CSS, and generally do whatever they wanted with the space, which turned out to be exactly the flexibility that pulled Friendster's frustrated user base over.
Every new user on MySpace was automatically given one starting "friend": Tom Anderson himself, whose photo and profile appeared as the default first connection on virtually every account created. That default made "Tom" one of the most widely recognized faces on the early social web, known affectionately (and sometimes not so affectionately) simply as "MySpace Tom."
The feature that caused actual fights
The Top 8 (the number changed slightly over time, but 8 is what most people remember) let users select a small set of friends to feature prominently, in a ranked order, directly on their profile page — visible to anyone who visited it. It was originally meant as a simple way to help new users understand the concept of a friends list, giving them a small, manageable task rather than an overwhelming blank slate.
What it actually became was a running, very public referendum on where you stood in someone's social hierarchy. Being bumped out of a friend's Top 8 could read as a real snub; being added to a crush's Top 8, or moved up within it, could read as a real signal. It generated exactly the kind of low-stakes-but-not-really-low-stakes social friction that teenagers are extremely good at noticing, and it became a defining, formative feature of what an early public "friends list" could actually mean once real feelings got attached to it.
The rise and the long fade
MySpace's growth through the mid-2000s was fast enough that it briefly became the most-visited website in the United States, ahead of even Google, at points in 2006. Anderson and DeWolfe sold the company to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 2005 for a reported $580 million — a deal that looked, at the time, like a clear signal that social networking was about to become serious business.
MySpace's decline came almost as quickly as its rise, as Facebook — with a cleaner interface, and initially a more exclusive, trustworthy college-based signup process — pulled away a huge share of MySpace's user base over the following few years. MySpace never fully recovered its cultural position, going through multiple ownership changes and relaunches, and eventually repositioning itself primarily around music rather than general social networking. But the Top 8 remains one of the clearest examples of how a small, almost incidental design decision — meant to help onboard new users — can end up shaping how an entire generation practiced the very public, very ranked business of friendship online.