The Rebrand, and Tom Steps Back

2010 is the rebrand year — the year MySpace tried to stop being a social network and become something else entirely, and the year Tom stopped being your friend.

My_____

In October 2010, MySpace relaunched with a new identity: a stylized "My_____" wordmark, the underscore left blank for you to fill in, and a repositioning away from social networking and toward what the company called a "social entertainment destination" for a target audience of 13 to 35.

The redesigned product organized itself around content — music, video, celebrity, topics — rather than around your friends list. The pitch, essentially, was: we concede social to Facebook, and we will own culture.

Analysis: this was the most honest strategic decision MySpace made after 2005, and it still failed, for a reason worth naming. Repositioning works when you are moving toward something you are uniquely good at and away from something you were never distinctive in. MySpace tried it in reverse. Its distinctive asset was the weird, self-authored profile — a thing nobody else offered. Its commodity asset was content aggregation, a thing everybody offered. The 2010 rebrand kept the commodity and retired the distinction.

Tom goes away

The other 2010 change was smaller and hit harder. New accounts stopped being auto-friended to Tom Anderson. In his place, MySpace introduced an automated help persona — T.O.M., for "The Official MySpace" guide — a support account rather than a person.

Anderson had already left operational roles in 2009. This was the cleanup: removing the last piece of him from the product. It was, from a product management perspective, entirely reasonable. A support bot answers questions. A retired founder does not.

It also removed the single most distinctive onboarding experience in consumer software history and replaced it with a helpdesk. Every new MySpace user from 2010 onward started with zero friends and a robot.

The numbers

Traffic fell through the year. Facebook crossed half a billion users in July 2010. MySpace's U.S. audience declined steadily, advertising revenue followed, and by early 2011 News Corporation had publicly confirmed it was exploring a sale of the property it had bought for $580 million six years earlier.

In February 2010, Owen Van Natta was out as CEO after ten months, replaced by co-presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn. Hirschhorn left the same year. Mike Jones ran the rebrand and would run the sale.

What it felt like

Like walking into a shop you used to go to and finding it has become a different shop with the same address. The logo was different. The layout was different. The friends list was still technically there, and nobody on it had logged in for a year.

Why this matters in 2026

The 2010 rebrand is the cleanest available example of a platform solving for the competitor instead of for itself. Every choice was legible as a reaction to Facebook: cede the social graph, chase entertainment, professionalize the interface, remove the eccentricity.

The relaunch now being discussed by MySpace's owners talks about being less algorithmic and less like what social media became. If that is real, 2010 is the year it must specifically refuse to repeat — the year MySpace decided the way to survive was to be less like MySpace.