MySpace Revamps Site To Recapture the Magic

Ponca City writes "MySpace has unveiled an overhauled website and logo as it attempts to recapture the magic that led it to top the social-networking sphere. According to the report 'MySpace is positioning itself for the so-called Gen Y crowd, or those roughly between 10 and 30 years old.' A beta version of the new website will start rolling out Wednesday and is slated to be accessible to users globally by the end of November. Plans are for the site to focus on entertainment with the home page constantly updating items about music, movies and television shows that are most discussed on the site at any one time."

Too late.

[Winckle]

As soon as Murdoch bought the site it tanked completely. Now obviously those two things aren't entirely connected. I can still be happy about it though. :)

Also worth seeing: [google.com]

Re:Too late.

[melikamp]

I wonder which magic they are gonna recapture. This one? [archive.org] Or this? [archive.org]

Re:Too late.

[Bertie]

I know someone who works there, and he tells me that when it was bought out, that Tom guy was very resistant to making the sort of changes to the site that anybody could see were needed. So it limped on with its awful mess of a Coldfusion codebase and no attempt to give it the sort of stickiness that saw Facebook skyrocket.

It's too late now. They've had their five years in the sun which any site like this can expect to have. It's just another graveyard like Geocities now. And honestly, did anybody expect anything else?

Re:Too late.

[falsified]

Wow, I totally forgot about Google Trends for some reason.

Were any other Americans surprised how few people in other countries went on Facebook compared to the US?

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com]

I figured it was kind of US-centric, but not to this extent.

Trends doesn't tell the story

[Infonaut]

Facebook is doing quite well in Europe [marketresearchworld.net].

Re:Too late.

[vlueboy]

If we take into account the prices they were charging people for hosting 100K pages with one time setup fees from your 13 year time machine [archive.org], it's interesting that they took the "free" route at some point. Well, we now know the whole internet did.

As visitors became the product to ad corps and data miners, the value or cost in myspace's business model must have remained pretty similar to those rates, and someone is paying for those. A kinda lowest ballpark of how much our visits are worth to sites like facebook.

I did see take interest to the simplicity and lack of immediate apparent user-driven content back then. That has morphed to the today's pr0n-site-like content layout (first illustration in the article) and the facebook-like social layout (second illustration.) Nothing original here, purge your myspace contact info now if you still haven't

Re:Name fail

[Keen Anthony]

In retrospect though, how many brilliant lyricists have existed in rock music? Elvis's music was ripe with horrible lyrics. I still think The Beatles' talent lay mostly in their music and not in their lyrics. Just to make a disclaimer, here are some musicians I feel are/were brilliant lyricists and songwriters: Roger Waters (Pink Floyd), Steve Harris (Iron Maiden), Stan Ridgway (Wall of Voodoo), Andy Prieboy (Wall of Voodoo), Ronnie James Dio (Dio, Black Sabbath, Elf, Rainbow), Russ Ballard (Argent), Robert Plant (Led Zeppelin), Neil Peart (Rush), Bernie Taupin (Elton John), John Cougar Mellancamp, Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Sting (The Police), Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Tom Waits, etc.

Steve Perry's lyrics weren't really that bad. No more offensive than those of Survivor (still a guilty pleasure of mine). And all the guys I named could really come up with some cliched lyrics too. :D It's all in good fun though!