In an attempt to bolster its fading popularity and to generate new members, MySpace has redesigned its site. It has created a myriad of new entertainment geared features in a hope to recapture some of its lost users to Facebook and to attract new users. While originally, MySpace became more of an entertainer/marketing too than Facebook anyway, I feel like this move may just be a little too late to save its legacy from the social network domination of Facebook.
According to the article, the number of unique visitors to MySpace dropped 18 percent in September alone. This is a colossal number to occur in a single month. Another huge number is the average minutes spent by visitors on the site, which dropped a whopping 42.5 percent while internet use as a whole was up 10 percent in the same timeframe. This is the cause for the drastic changes MySpace has put into the face of its site.
One of my biggest problems in MySpace was the intricacy it took to create one’s homepage. It was fairly complicated to accomplish for someone with little web page creation knowledge. The new beta version of MySpace claims to make this easier as well as the ability to search the wealth of knowledge available to MySpace users. You can personalize your likes to generate a specification of what you look at, and content hubs make your likes much more accessible. The content hubs will direct information from such sites as MTV to directly tie in the personalized likes to the user. The only truly interesting thing I can find in this article about the MySpace redesign is that a user will be able to toggle between 3 different types of views; the traditional view, a magazine type view, and a ‘play’ view which will allow the user to change the sizes of the windows and advertisements in real time. MySpace will also give former and current users who understood the shortcomings of the old version to actively comment and suggest changes to the new site. Another new concept MySpace is using is a new mobile site interface, which will allow easier use from mobile devices.
All this seems like great improvements from the MySpace of old, but I feel that other social sites, namely Facebook, have taken over as the king of the mountain. The new features of MySpace seem like a lackluster attempt to create what Facebook already has. It will be difficult, also, to lure back in old users/Facebook users because of its growing popularity in pop culture, especially since a movie. It will be interesting to see how the changes of MySpace will help it turn around to its former glory as a premier social network.
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