Differences Between Old-School MySpace & Spacehey

Things keep randomly coming back to me about MySpace and how it differs from Spacehey. If you were never on MySpace, this may be an interesting read for you. If you were on MySpace, this might be a trip down memory lane. This is not by any means a complete list, just the stuff I can remember at the time of posting this blog.

General Differences

• There was a banner ad on everyone's profile. It was against the terms to cover it.
• The search bar gave you the option to search MySpace or search the web with Google. The Advanced Search was also functional and made it easier to search for things with filters.
• The navigation bar had different options for things that Spacehey doesn't have. And vice versa.
• The profile-info section of your profile (the box above your list of blogs that says "SomeUser is your friend") was on everyone's page, not just friends. It would read "SomeUser is in your extended network". This was because each person was connected with Tom by default when they created their account, so all of Tom's friends were automatically connected (made visible) to you in an extended network.
• There were Pictures and Videos sections.
• There was a default music player that could be used.
• There were Music profiles that allowed up to 4 songs instead of 1.
• There was a "Top 8" where you could choose and arrange your top 8 friends. Oh the drama that created. lol.
• The Instant Message in the contact box was actually for an instant messenger.
• Our friend lists (at least in my experience) contained a large quantity of "real life" friends.

Here's a screenshot I found online.

Coding Differences

• It was a time of HTML 4 and CSS 2. Some things worked differently and some things we have now weren't a thing yet.
• Flash was everywhere. Fully animated/interactive flash profiles got pretty impressive towards the end of MySpace's success. I never really knew much about how those worked because I was running mostly Linux by that point and creating flash stuff in Linux wasn't an easy task.
• IP tracking totally happened. It wasn't allowed, but lots of people did it. The method that was used also allowed for other, more complex, things to be done with one's profile.
• There was a "Profile 2.0". The goal of this was to make it easier for non-coders to customize things. However, it removed a lot of the customization options for the coders at the same time.
• I feel like maybe there was a Preview button when working on your layout? Maybe it wasn't until Profile 2.0? If I remember correctly there was one but it only kinda half worked. I think...

The Browser Wars

• Testing layouts in various browsers was a must for coders. The main browsers in use at the time were Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. And it was not uncommon to have your layout look completely different depending on the browser. To balance this, we had to learn to code in ways that forced things to display the same across browsers. Or at least as close as we could get it.
• Internet Explorer had it's own code that could be used to create some pretty cool effects. However, this code only worked when the user viewed the page with Internet Explorer, so it was often avoided to keep things looking the same for everyone.
• There wasn't a lot of us Linux users back then, but I can assure you Firefox in Windows didn't always display the same as Firefox in Linux. So workarounds had to be used for circumstances like that as well.
• Then came smart phones... Blackberry, Iphone, Android, and of course they all displayed things differently. Very much so back then. There were so many coming out that trying to make code compatible with them all was frustrating.

Do any of you old-school MySpacers remember things that were different? Feel free to share your thoughts or comments.