MySpace Tom's doppelganger has emerged and his wife filmed the moment she realized, unlocking a new level of millennial nostalgia
- A woman filmed her hunched over husband as he resembled the cofounder of MySpace.
- The clip blew up with 2.8 million views as comments questioned if it was really Tom Anderson.
A woman who filmed her husband's uncanny resemblance to the cofounder of MySpace blew up online, sparking a nostalgic discussion among millennials in the comment section.
On October 29, a TikToker who goes by Jined posted a video of a man, who in a previous video she referred to as her husband and tagged as Evan Holladay, as he sat hunched over. Behind the camera, the woman who filmed the video could be heard wheezing with laughter as she tried to explain to Holladay that he looked like Tom Anderson, the former face of social media platform MySpace.
Anderson cofounded MySpace in August 2003 and it went on to be used by nearly 76 million people in the US during its peak popularity in 2008. Anderson became the first "friend" of anyone who signed up, and his profile photo, in which he was slightly hunched over and looked over his shoulder at the camera, became synonymous with the site, Insider previously reported.
Towards the end of the TikTok, Holladay seemed to catch on, and asked if it was his posture and "sideways glancing" towards the camera that created the similarity while the woman struggled to speak as she continued to laugh.
The video received 2.8 million views and over 7,100 comments, many of which wrote they immediately thought of MySpace too when they saw the video. Some appeared to initially think the TikToker's husband was really Anderson, and the video was behind-the-scenes footage of the moment the iconic profile photo was taken.
"I'm going to tell my Gen Z kids this is MySpace Tom," one viewer joked in a popular comment.
Others used the moment to reminisce about their experiences on the once popular social media platform, in which users could customize their profiles using HTML and CSS, choose which specific song played when a visitor landed on their page, and carefully cultivated who got the priority spot in their top friends featured on their profile.
"MySpace was the best social media platform… we didn't know what we had," one viewer wrote, alongside a smiling face with a tear emoji.
"This is the true millennial test," one viewer wrote in another popular comment, as they appeared to suggest that those who thought of MySpace after watching the video revealed themselves as belonging to the generation.
In a follow-up video, the TikToker responded directly to a comment asking Holladay to don a white T-shirt to more closely match the original photo. In the upload, which received an additional 69,000 views, Holladay attempted to recreate the pose, as viewers once again remarked on the resemblance.
In 2009, Anderson retired as a multi-millionaire before the age of 40, after News Corp. bought MySpace and its parent company, Intermix, for $580 million four years prior, Insider previously reported.
Anderson has since traveled the world and shared the photographs he captured along the way to his Instagram account, where he still uses his iconic MySpace profile photo to this day.