These would get dirty quickly. (Photo: Instagram)

MySpace cofounder-turned-Internet jagoff Tom Anderson really wants your approval. On his Twitter account earlier today, Mr. Anderson broke the cardinal rule of social media: he asked for likes.

The man affectionately known as "MySpace Tom" asked his followers to double tap on an Instagram of a pair of Toms shoes (GET IT?) emblazoned with his infamous MySpace selfie in order to land it on the popular page.

Sadly, Mr. Anderson's followers did not come to his aid. As of this writing, the photo racked up just 1,300 likes, probably because the shoes lack proper arch support.

Stick to posting your heavily edited vacation pictures on your Twitter account, Mr. Anderson. This is not the proper way to build your #personal #brand.

lol ur poor (Photo: Twitter)

Tom Anderson, a.k.a. "MySpace Tom," is an American Internet icon responsible for creating what was once the world's most influential social network before it devolved into pages upon pages of sparkly animated GIFs and tExT tHaT LoOkS lIkE tHiS. That picture of him mugging in a white tee before a white board is seared into our collective subconscious, perhaps representative of a time and a place when MySpace didn't need Justin Timberlake to sell the concept.

Though he sold MySpace to News Corps. in 2005, Mr. Anderson is still the poster child for the early aughts' favorite Internet timesuck. And ya know what? He’s pretty damn sick of people ripping on his claim to fame.

When Mr. Anderson tweeted about Instagram's new terms of service, a snarky Twitter follower tried to one-up him, but Mr. Anderson would have none of that:

(Photo: Imgur)

Burn! The working class, amiright?

Mr. Anderson added that the offending Twitter user has subsequently deleted his account. "Does that mean I win?" he quipped.

Oh, and for the record, don't expect Mr. Anderson to swap out that iconic white board selfie any time soon. "If I used a new pic it would break the Internet," he tweeted. "my pic has been viewed more than than the mona lisa bitch." Can we get a half-day off from this guy?

I had to wonder, is Google+ really more of a minus?

The launch of Google+ has brought former MySpace president Tom Anderson--now one of its most popular beta users--out of the woodwork recently. (You'll recognize the white t-shirt.) In a guest post on TechCrunch, Mr. Anderson reacts to Kevin Rose's recent, seemingly-brash decision to migrate his entire blog over to Google+ by posing the ontological question: "What kind of content creator are you? Kevin Rose or Fred Wilson?"

In that equation, Mr. Rose would be the looser blogger, willing to jump in bed with a new technology to attract new readers and Mr. Wilson, who blogs at A VC, the more cautious Carrie, wanting readers to come to him. Even though Union Square Ventures has invested in Tumblr, for example, Mr. Wilson doesn't use the platform for A VC.  "Kevin abandoned his blog in an instant, whereas Fred built up his blog over years and years. What school do you belong to?" asks Mr. Anderson.

But he also notes that the issue isn't just for bloggers. "It’s about web presence generally," Mr. Anderson writes, adding:

"Remember TV commercials promoting AOL keywords. Would brands have been smarter to promote their own websites? How about musicians using Myspace as their only website? Bands first used MySpace as an adjunct to their website, but gradually more and more of them found maintaining their own website a pain and shut them down entirely. Even major recording artists printed their MySpace URLs (and not their website URLs) on their CD covers. Visit those MySpace URLs now and they’re ghost towns. How about Youtube video channels. Can you imagine a day when Youtube is no longer the best place to find video?

Phrasing the issue in a new way, and perhaps a better way is: Should a content creator go to his audience, or should he expect his audience to come to him?"

We're apt to heed Mr. Anderson's warning. After all, he should know from ghost towns.

We thought you suffocated under an avalanche of spam banners!

SocialStatistics.com, the website that measures the most popular Google+ users by their number of followers, has had a bang-up week. In just seven days, founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, announced this morning that his site (built in 24 hours from concept to product) picked up 300,000 unique visitors, a million pageviews, "and the servers didn't even go down"! It's further proof of our thesis that early adopters are using Google+ as just another social media status symbol.

But when we checked out the top 20 users on SocialStatistics page this afternoon, we noticed a different--but familiar!-- face up there with the ranks of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry, and Sergey. The grainy photo... the plain white t-shirt... the chicken scratch on the white board... the awkward head turn. Tom from MySpace, is that you??!

In fact, Tom Anderson, who served as president of MySpace from 2003 to 2009, has been very active on Google+ since its launch, although clearly he's not bothering with a more recent pic. But he did fill out his profile. Occupation? "Enjoying being retired :)" Currently 18,520 users have added Mr. Anderson to their circle--making him the 13th most followed beta user. But based on the fact that he hasn't added anyone back yet, it seems these days he's much less interested in being your default friend.

Update: Mr. Anderson wrote back to Betabeat via email. Although he was too busy at the moment to share his thoughts on whether it's even possible for one social network to last decades or whether he sees Google making the some of the same mistakes as MySpace, he did correct us about assuming that he's become less-friendly. "I have my privacy settings on so people can't see who I'm following. Since my profile gets a lot of attention, I didn't want to bother any of my friends."