Facebook has, for the last five years at least, been the top dog of social media. But perhaps the balance of power could be about to shift back in the other direction.
That will certainly be what the shiny new Myspace is hoping for.
Last night during a Facebook server outage (well why else?) I went to have a look at the re-branded Myspace to see whether it had a chance of competing. Here's a summary of what I found out and what you should do if going back to your old best internet friend is something you're thinking of.
First off, the new Myspace is very pretty. It looks as if the design of the site was at the forefront of the new owners' minds. They've taken the best bits of their rivals' designs and incorporated them into their own, with a sleek looking newsfeed sitting in the middle of the home page ranked by your control panel on the left and a very clever music bar down the right, which I'll talk about later. The new profiles look better too with the clunky, do-it-yourself style image of the old ones completely revamped. It's also a lot easier to edit than Facebook so you can delete/ add any new 'modules' you like.
Now for the music bar. On the right hand side of your home page you'll see a list of songs that are there ready for you to play. You don't have to download anything or pay any money, you can just click a button and sound filters out into your ears. The reason this is clever is because the music is adaptive to what you've been listening to. Mine is full of songs I've already listened to (I'm assuming on Spotify, there's a deep lying link in ownership there) as well as songs that I might like based on those already listened to artists. I'm not big on new music but for those who are this could prove a nice little touch.
One of the main reasons social networks do well is because of their easy functionality. The new Myspace has that in abundance. After logging on for the first time in six years I had to quickly get rid of EVERYTHING that was on there and Myspace made this whole process relatively painless. 'Ew, old profile picture,' I said. 'No worries! Let's pretend it never happened. Here's a new one,' Myspace replied. I was on and updated within a few minutes and now my profile looks a lot less like what a shy, emotionally repressed 16 year old would like and a lot more what an overly confident 22 year old would like. Brilliant. There are more aspects that you can customise as you'd expect, such as your background picture or the cover photo but the site also offers you designs that have already been done. Less trying to fit your own image into Facebook dimensions, more just clicking and going.
Of course all of this really means nothing if no-one is using the service. It's obvious Myspace has thought long and hard about how it wants to look and where it wants to fit in the heaving mass of social media, but all of that thought still might not bring the people back. It's quite odd going back to something you used to use and seeing how you used to act and that could put a lot of people off, whereas the option to start over fresh might be more appealing. You can do that (delete your profile, make a new one) but it's effort, will people be willing to put that in?
And it's clear that a good design isn't ultimately what people are after. Facebook can be incredibly ugly but that's not put many people off.
Overall I definitely think it's a step or ten in the right direction. It's made changes that need to be made and it's set out to fill what it sees as a gap in the market with music. It also has vastly less adverts than Facebook (YAY!) but that's likely not a design choice and rather just the result of less advertisers wanting a presence until more people are using the site.
Still, good effort Timberlake. You've certainly tried to bring sexy back. (Sorry.)