MySpace Revamps Site To Recapture the Magic 137
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."
Name fail (Score:2)
My (blank) ???
Re:Name fail (Score:4, Insightful)
What age group range is Generation "X"?
Where is the cutoff for boomers age-wise?
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I thought boomers were fat, not old!
Re:Name fail (Score:5, Funny)
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Any way you want it thats the way you need it any way you want it bowdowdowdowdowdowdowdoodoo
Oh hey, sorry, was just playing Rock Band 2, whats up?
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Dude, it's painful to me that you used Journey as an example. In my darker moments I still have flashbacks to the feathered Steve Perry hair and horrible lyrics like, "The smell of wine and cheap perfume... ." Now I feel a bit ill.
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Just picture it sung by a Korean kid, and you become hip again!
YMMV
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I even played the Journey arcade game. I guess that makes me really old.... now get off my lawn.
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Last time I checked, Gen X was composed of those born between 1962 and 1980. If you have a Journey song on your MP3 player that's not "Don't Stop Believin'", you're probably Gen X.
Hmm. I don't. But I have two Toto tracks that aren't Rosanna. Does that count?
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Well fuck, I was born in '87 and I have four*. Should I be worried?
Depends. Were you intentionally being retro when you put them on there?
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Gen X is roughly people who're now 30-50. Varies a bit, can include people in their late 20s, maybe some early 50s. Maybe doesn't include late 40s.
The literal post-war "baby boom" of 1945-1950 would be people now 60-65. It's used more broadly to include some people born later, though, but not much later than, say, the late 1950s. If you think of boomer culture involving things like anti-Vietnam protests, the Beatles, hippiedom, etc., that has to be people who were at least, say, teenagers by 1970.
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Those under 20 are more like Generation Z.
From a Gen X point of view, Gen Z are terrifying -- God help us all when they are in charge of something important. It seems that Gen X has become terrible parents.
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Agreed. There's definitely a transition period, depending in large part on when people first got computers. For people like me, at 33, we're more like the generation that contains the twenty-somethings. For the ones who didn't get computers until high school or college, they're more like Gen X. That said, I don't think I know anybody my age who doesn't fit better with the younger crowd. By the time you get to people who are about 37 or so, you're well into the Gen X territory.
That said, I readily admit
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Does this rule work in every case? No. I never said it was a good rule.
I like texting. I never thought I would, but I like the instant connection to my girlfriend
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That said, I readily admit that I don't get the whole text messaging thing. It's not that I can't parse it---it's just a subtle variation on the dialect we used to use on 1200 baud BBSes in the 80s. I just don't get why anybody would willingly pay money to use it when it costs more for a few hundred bytes than for a few minutes of talk time.... I also don't get why so many young people seem to think ROFL, LOL, etc. are new.... Kids today....
In most countries (except the US apparently) texts are free to receive and very cheap to send, which is precisely why they are so popular with relatively cash-strapped teenagers/schoolkids.
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Mapping generation boundaries is tricky business and there isn't really an absolute. But if you were born during the Carter administration, when your parents were expecting to get you a small pox vaccination, I think that's gen X.
So much of what folks cite as Gen Y life experience just doesn't apply until you were born in at le
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All Generation Y says is "the one that came after Generation X".
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Hell, I prefer "Baby Busters" to "Generation X". The X thing never made much sense to me. (Also, AFAIK the official end of the Baby Boom generation in terms of the tail end of the birth rate bubble was 1964, so 1965 and later is the Baby Bust or Gen X.)
As to when it ended, I think that if you don't clearly remember where you were when the Challenger exploded, you're too young for Gen X.
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Not sure. At 29 I fall into the 10-30 range, but every previous definition I'd heard put me into Gen-X territory. Also heard it called "Nintendo Generation" a few times. Of course a roommate of mine who was once completely "anti-videogame" took EXTREME offense to that and swore (to the point of getting flustered) that he was NOT a member of "nintendo generation". Explanations that it just referred to an age range and not a hobby fell on deaf ears. He was of the video games are "uncool" variety - strang
What? (Score:1)
Re:What? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Too late. (Score:5, Interesting)
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]
recapture the Magic (Score:3, Insightful)
and the money. There's a fortune to be made both stealing and prying into people's private lives. Expect Murdoch who always trolls for scandal that will advance his business interests to be eager to tune his new media property, you.
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And according to that chart, myspace still has some users in Malaysia. But unfortunately, I don't have a joke to follow up on that observation.
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as Murdoch bought the site it tanked completely. Now obviously those two things aren't entirely connected.
I wouldn't be surprised if they were entirely connected, though with perhaps the reverse of the causal relationship some people might assume.
After all, if you think you've driven your product to the maximum market value its ever going to have, its obviously a good time to sell; if you think you can cost-effectively make it worth more on the market before selling it, it makes sense to sell it.
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder which magic they are gonna recapture. This one? [archive.org] Or this? [archive.org]
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MySpace Revamps Site To Recapture the Magic
Recapture the MAGIC? Does it involve PINK PONIES?
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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 facebo
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Costs for hosting have dramatically decreased, but also I think that 'myspace' bears no relation to the 'myspace' social networking site. I would say it's more a case that MySpace's founder came up with the name, discovered the domain was already registered, and offered to buy it from whoever was using it to sell business web hosting.
Quite fascinating to see, though. Thanks.
May 2000 [archive.org] seems to be when they started offering free web hosting with an eye to building a userbase. I get the impression ownership of
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Very true. Thanks for the added research. It seems too sudden to just be one company changing models, and yourZ.com appears to be dead. Anyway, I took another look and found there are a couple pictures [archive.org] in the tour page, and forgot how much of a Friendster clone it was --its AOLification is what made it win that battle.
Date-hopping on wayback machine tends to be a pain. Just last night I was browsing through some fan forums for a Showtime show ending on 2004. Less than a year later, the domain was parked, ap
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Whereas, after that aspect of web design had apparently died out by the millennium (because it was obviously horrid, I'd assumed), the first place I see it on a new page in years is... MySpace. Along with lots of other Geocities:The Next Generation style tackiness.
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Actually, both of those pages would be an improvement over the current MySpace.
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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 expec
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That's so great. I think the ONLY thing that can save this dead site is the ability to post and share music, movies and television shows. Of course, they and the MPAA and RIAA could never come to grips with that, not for free which it would need to be. Even though it would generate shitloads of real traffic and sales through the roof for the bands willing to be involved with freely shared music and other medias. That'll never happen. Hey, I'm sharing anyway. Make me want to join, or expect defeat.
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It wouldn't have mattered. My Space, Facebook and all the rest are fads. They come and go. Once your 15 minutes of fame are up, that's it, people have already moved on to the latest "new big thing".
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I think facebook is a bit different than myspace in that it's EVERYWHERE. Myspace was a cool place to find people I haven't spoken to in a while, but required an actual visit to their site. Facebook has almost completely replaced personal e-mails. Both of my phones have access to every phone number of every one of my Facebook friends who post them. Facebook has SMS alerts, Outlook 2010 integration, and, though I despise them personally, Farmville and Mafia Wars. Also, it was much simpler to actually find th
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It's actually very simple, most Americans are obsessed with "one-upping" their peers as it is the American way. We want to see the jock/popular-girl 10 years down the road and read or see about his/her failures with higher education / weight gain / hair loss / unplanned pregnancies / divorces / legal issues. We also hold events known as class reunions, this event is held for the same purpose.
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As soon as Murdoch bought the site it tanked completely. Now obviously those two things aren't entirely connected.
Yes they are.
That's the day I stopped logging in.
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As soon as Murdoch bought the site it tanked completely. Now obviously those two things aren't entirely connected.
Yes they are. That's the day I stopped logging in.
(Assumed implication being that you stopped using MySpace because Murdoch bought it).
I can't figure out if you're being serious here. Are you actually suggesting that you think your decision to leave for that reason is significant in the scheme of things (i.e. millions of users) or even that it reflects the reasons for everyone else leaving?
Because- much as I think Murdoch is worthless scum and understand your reasons- it's egotistical or deluded to believe that either of these is the case. Sorry to sa
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Okay. Everyone else avert your eyes while I reveal the secret clue to our friend here:
I was making a joke. "MySpace sucks because I left." See?
Alright, you can open your eyes now.
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From what I've seen, part of it was when high school kids who got accepted to college got their .edu email addresses early; that allowed them to register for Facebok and join the community of their new school. This led to a stratification where Facebook became the place where the college-bound kids hung out and Myspace was left to the people who weren't going to college. I've read that this extended to the military in Iraq, where Myspace, largely used by the enlisted men, was blocked at the firewall but F
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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 (Score:3, Interesting)
Facebook is doing quite well in Europe [marketresearchworld.net].
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Can Murdoch buy Facebook too? ;)
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Funny)
For a demo of the new site, go here [goatse.fr].
Well, it's not as bad as it used to be.
A site for Gen-Y 10-30 somethings? (Score:1)
MySpace?.. I liked it better when it was called Facebook!
its dead (Score:5, Insightful)
myspace == new geocities.
I stopped using it because I was sick of all the garish pages people would put together and the automated music playing.
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myspace == new geocities.
I stopped using it because I was sick of all the garish pages people would put together and the automated music playing.
Amen, brother. That and the endless pages that grow so big that they crash my browser. Who in their right mind designs a social networking site that displays every comment ever made on your page?
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Uh, doesn't facebook do the same thing, more or less? Sure it's hidden with some javascript junk, ...
No. It uses AJAX to retrieve older stuff once you ask for it.
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Also getting spammed by shitty bands. I realize that may have been the original point of myspace, which ended up being what drove me back away from myspace.
The bigger issue was probably that facebook seemed to have better features, and it took me a while to realize that those features were coming at an increased cost of privacy.
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Amen, brother! They let people program their own webpages with html and look what it got us, a garish nightmare of unreadable crap. What we really need is some site that prevented people from doing whatever they wanted with their own site. Hem it in like some sort of garden. Then block them from doing what they want with it like it was walled off. It's the only wa
What else is new? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Hm. I heard MySpace was for young girls and old men looking for young girls. No wonder Rupert wanted it! And, I'm sure he lost many a night's sleep trying to figure out how to pay-wall the damn thing...
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I'm sure he lost many a night's sleep trying to figure out how to pay-wall the damn thing...
Monsters don't sleep, they wait.
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Since when was Myspace ever NOT Gen-Y oriented? My Gen-X brain had it filed under "Wretched Hive of Scum and Villany" since the first day I stumbled onto some 14 year old's putrid purple-and-pink theme, complete with animated-GIF hearts and skulls and two Avril Lavigne videos playing simultaneously.
Hey, I'm a forty-something male, you insensitive clod!
Oopsie...
Yeah. (Score:2)
Yeah.
The place is so full of 30-60 somethings that you can't get a Justin Bieber quote in edgewise...
the #1 reason myspace failed (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook locks down the look and feel of their website quite a lot and for branding purposes that's a good thing.
Durned kids (Score:1)
MySpace is positioning itself for the so-called Gen Y crowd, or those roughly between 10 and 30 years old.
As a member of the decreasingly relevant Gen X crowd, let me be the first to say 'Get off MyLawnSpace.'
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Gen Y? (Score:2)
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Also Tumblr, seems to have a decent userbase.
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IIRC I was almost driving age at that point. By the time we got the net a while later, it was still way before most people were using it.
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Internet access was not prevalent in South-Central Texas until about '98 or '99, and it was dial up AOL.
IIRC, broadband was not rolled out widespread until about '01 or '02 and I did not get broadband in my area until about '04.
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By the mid 90s when internet access became fairly widespread you'd have been fifteen or so, and there's not that much difference from first using the internet at fifteen or thirty.
The big difference is with people born after the early Nineties who have been exposed to the internet since they were conscious.
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pedantic warning:
IRC is different from the others listed in that:
-It's a pretty well established, matured PROTOCOL. Many other chat applications use some principles of IRC on the back end (I've dealt with several java and AJAX-based chat/support products that boil down to a really shiny skin over IRC)
-It's used a lot for the file transfer functionality (we only swap Linux distros! really!)
-the alternatives to it have been AIM/MSN/ICQ (which are better for one-on-one chats, but not for groups or an "open doo
The target isn't FaceBook (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO they don't want to steal users from FaceBook, they want to prevent Apple's Ping from becoming the next largest media-based social network because that's where the money is: movies, TV shows, music and ads.
The thing is, all iTunes users already have the potential of being Ping users, it's only one click away.
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Ewwww, tell me where so I don't accidentally click on that! That's the cyber-equivalent of stepping in dogshit.
Suggestion: contact Richard Hell (Score:2)
http://www.richardhell.com/lyrics2.html#BlankGeneration [richardhell.com]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP3x-VdOb44 [youtube.com]
(And of course: http://www.myspace.com/richardhellvoidoids [myspace.com] )
It even addresses MySpace's problem:
I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time
I belong to the ______ generation but
I can take it or leave it each time
.
The Site that Brought you.... (Score:2)
Tila Tequila
The world will never be the same.
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Gotta love PHB's (Score:1)
A brilliant strategy to capture a niche ignored by FaceBook, which targets 11 to 31 year-olds.
More? (Score:2, Insightful)
Good luck with that.
News at 11 (Score:3)
As someone who has made a conscious decision from the very beginning to shun the whole MySpaceBook/Twittedin/social networking phenomenon, let me be the first to say:
Pffrrghttblargh!
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Don't you know, the correct spelling is:
PFFTFTHTF!!!!!!!
How can a website go PFFTFTHTF!!!!!!! anyway?
How about music sites that cater (Score:3, Insightful)
to people in the 30/40's, what are we dead? But I guess that would mean they would have to dig up creative artists that don't release songs that have ran through some software algorithm too see if it'll be consumed by the masses.
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Never mind that, I'd be happy to simply have tunes released without the "screw dynamic range, let's make it sound LOUDER for radio diffusion" crap.
Seriously, watch the waveforms of a lot of tunes sold on iTunes and other places. It's a shame to see the music labels completely destroying the tunes they're in charge of selling.
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huh? (Score:2)
Received an email about it this morning. (Score:2)
Just received an unsolicited commercial email from them advertising this new site (what's that other term for these again?) It went to one of our support accounts...the kind that wouldn't be found unless one were to skim a web site for email addresses.
The unsubscribe link from this invitation to join requires that I first "log into my account". The email is an invitation to join.
SNL's MySpace Seminar (Score:2)
If they really wanted to generate buzz... (Score:1)
They should announce the new site on their Facebook page.
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MySpace is still around? (Score:2)
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Did you go to the prom with my ex-wife?
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different ideas. Google's home page is great if you're actually searching for stuff. Yahoo is a bit better at putting some ideas in front of you when you're not quite sure what to look for. While the page may not be layed out perfectly, it does have much more information on it and I've read some articles on it (and -don't judge me bro- MSN.com) that I wouldn't necessarily have searched for, but was worth 2 minutes of my time to skim through. The fact that I got distracted by half a dozen ads has made Yahoo