Remember when you were sixteen years old and your life revolved around a monolithic social networking website where you would send passive-aggressive bulletin messages about your INVITES ONLY house party and embed black and white Photobucket images of your fringe and add every Dashboard Confessional fan who lived within a 1000km radius of you? There’s a new version of that.
Myspace has just unveiled New Myspace – a social network resuscitation project built “entirely from scratch” and specifically designed for “empowering people to express themselves however they want” – unless you chosen mode of expression is night club flyers and server-crushing profile bedazzling.
A point reiterated by Myspace Australia’s former Social Media Marketing Manager Alex Wain, who wrote in an op-ed piece for us last year: “Myspace was never built to have 110 million users at its peak, purely because founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe never envisaged it growing so rapidly. Amusingly enough, the ability to actually customize your page was a coding loophole that a user exploited originally. The company then decided to use it as the point of difference in the market. It was that very same ability to customize your profile, which would later become their downfall as millions upon millions of hideous fluro profiles, loaded with dozens of animated GIFs crashed browsers around the world.”
It appears the designers and developers have been listening. The latest version feels lighter, cleaner and more intuitive. Navigation is divided into five main tabs including “Profile”, “Latest”, “Mixes”, “Connections” and “Photos”. “Profile” is your narcissism nerve centre while “Latest” displays all your friends’ status updates through a handsome, easy to navigate side-scrolling timeline feed vaguely reminiscent of the infinite scroll on Dazed Digital.
And, as has been Myspace’s M.O. from the start, particular attention has been paid to music. A “Discover” tab allows users to view trending artists, create mixes and stream new singles and music videos. Even at this early stage it feels like a more engaging and capable music discovery tool than Facebook, so there’s an early win. Best of all, you can join now using your existing Facebook or Twitter accounts, though it is now yet known how many Macy’s gift cards you receive upon sign up.
Check out the new and improved Myspace below…
