My Internet History

I was recently reminiscing about MSN Messenger with an old friend and we were talking about how funny it would be to be able to look back at all of our old chat logs. While I'm sure the majority of the conversations would just be full of boring exchanges such as 'wuu2', 'nothing, u?' and millions of emoticons, it would still be interesting to see what we talked about every day despite having just spent six solid hours together at school.

This then led me on a quest of trying to dig out all of my old profiles on various websites and social networks that I used to use back when we had dial-up and it took hours just to load a page.




1. Myspace

I tried as many combinations of emails and passwords as I could remember, but I couldn't get back into my Myspace account. I did manage to find my account though, but since the redesign it doesn't quite feel the same. No more drama of the Top 8 Friends or the joy of having a list of notifications as you logged in. So many evenings were spent with a friend huddled around one big desktop computer checking our Myspace account for updates from friends or random people asking PC4PC.

Here are some classic Myspace emo shots that I found instead for your enjoyment, although they're not too bad. I think I would need to remember my logins to find the worst ones tucked away in an album somewhere.

I wish I'd taken screenshots of my profile every time I changed it, as I used to spend hours tweaking my profile and searching for the HTML codes for cute things like falling stars or an ice lolly cursor. My profile songs were also carefully curated, but mainly included songs from My Chemical Romance's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge.

2. Habbo Hotel

Before Myspace there was a pixel hotel that took hours to load and often crashed and every swearword came out as 'bobba'. I used to think this was the coolest chat room ever with the tiny pixel furniture and clothes. I remember spending most of my phone credit on becoming a part of the Habbo Club where you could buy better furniture and clothes, and access VIP rooms. I actually sacrificed texting my friends for impressing people on the internet...

Me and a friend also used to scam furniture off people playing that musical chairs type of game in our rooms. We were terrible people. Although I do remember giving away all of my furniture when I last logged in. I think I may have shut down my account as I unfortunately can't get in to it either.

3. LiveJournal

Dear Diary, mood - apathetic. If Myspace was the place where we all pretended to be interesting and exciting, LiveJournal was where we all went to pour out our teen angst.

I actually managed to get into this account and it is so cringeworthy and hilarious.

A lot of my usernames included 'ma'. M for 'em' and A for 'ah', which makes Emma. Yeah, weird logic. And look at that alternating capitalisation and ~ marks. Amazing. And for the MCR fans, yes those are lyrics from Thank You for the Venom. Let's take a look at a few entries, shall we?

All of the text speak, as if I also had to fit as many words in as possible before being charged 12p for sending another text. I love how it changes from being a party invite to an update on boys. I don't even remember who I was referring to in that bit, but I do remember the water party. It consisted of one paddling pool, one water gun and like five water bombs. Oh, and vodka stolen from my parents' alcohol cupboard.

Here I address being socially awkward and being jealous of people with piercings and tattoos. I'm kind of glad I wasn't allowed those things at that age as I would have made some terrible, terrible choices. Mainly lots of thick, black emo stars down my wrist or on my chest.

4. Neopets

These are just in the order in which I remember them as I started playing Neopets way before any of the above. I remember signing up in the computer room at primary school where the internet was worse than the one at home because of all of the firewalls. I do remember that one boy somehow managed to print off the entire WWE website though.

I'm quite glad that the Neopets site hasn't changed much in the past 10 years. All the hard corners and blue banners and clunky design. Yet again I can't log in to my account, but I did find my public profile, and look how sad my Neopets look. Slowly decaying trapped in an inactive account. Someone please put them out of their misery?

I remember being so excited when I won the Cloud paintbrush. I spent far too many hours playing games on that site trying to collect or trade rare items.

5. Piczo and Faceparty

Unfortunately Piczo was closed down in 2012 so there's no way I can try and recover my account/poorly designed website. Rest assured it was just a shine to My Chemical Romance. I really latched onto that band for 2 years...

Faceparty was a bit of a weird one and more of a dating site, although it looks a lot sleazier now than I remember. I do know that me and my friends felt a bit 'grown up' joining the site and I think we all lied about our ages on there too. I know one of my friends used to chat to someone who was two year above us at school which was SCANDALOUS, but I don't remember using it that often.

From there we all moved onto Facebook, which seemed really boring and bland in comparison to Myspace, but that's where everyone was migrating to and we just followed. And poked everyone for a good year.

It's been a bit weird visiting websites I haven't visited in years and really frustrating trying to remember passwords from more than 10 years ago (gulp!). It doesn't help that the hotmail address that all of these accounts are linked to has been deleted by Microsoft. It's made me think of the sites we used to visit for funny videos and games before we had YouTube and CandyCrush, but that's a whole other post.

Did you ever log on to any of these sites and do you have any embarrassing Live Journal posts to share? Please do!