The new MySpace at new.myspace.com is currently in beta, therefore you have to submit your email address and wait for an invitation. After signing up more than 3 months ago, I finally received my invite last night and decided to check it out.
MySpace has went under a serious overhaul, and I have to say... it has a good chance of rivaling facebook. That is, if you can get your friends to make the jump as well. Because let's face it, a website can be beautiful and well built, but if nobody uses it, it's worthless cough Google+ cough.
So what's so good about it. Well let's talk about what has carried over from the old MySpace that you once logged into for hours at a time, picking the song that represented 14 year old you, posting on your friends page, and picking the most gaudy background and text that made your eyes burn when you tried to read it.
Music
Yup. Background songs are still here. You'll still be listening to your friends current favorite song (that they'll forget to update and you'll be listening to Nicki Minaj every time you visit their page, and you start looking around for the nearest pencil to stick through your eardrum). What may be a new feature, is that you can now queue up several songs to play in a row so that's it not the same song over and over again. You can even queue up songs to listen to while your browsing other friends pages.
The whole site actually seems to be heavily music focused. There are pages for selecting songs or artists that you like and you can connect to other people with the same interests. There are tabs for building your own mixes that you can make public, ala Spotify.
Cover Page
Here's where the new layout is looks really good. When you click on you or friends home page, you're presented with of course their profile pic, but also their cover photo, reminiscent of facebook, only it takes up the whole background.
The layout is nice and sharp, as you can see. Scrolling to the right lets you see all of your status updates, photos uploaded, songs added, similar to your wall on facebook.
All in all, the layout is nice and clean. Everything is easily readable, unlike the MySpace of old. Although I'm sure todays 15 year olds will find a way to use the worse background possible.
Stream
The stream page will be the first page your presented when you log in. Here's where the status updates of people you've connected with will appear. Photos they've uploaded, songs they've added, posts they've...posted.
Final Opinion
Honestly, I like it. Of course I've only played with it for less than 24 hours, and I don't currently have any friends on there to see how the stream layout looks. But I give MySpace some props for completely redesigning their aging site and making it look good. And if enough people switch over to it, it could definitely give facebook a run for their money, especially if they are able to make a mobile that works as well as their site (I'm looking at you Facebook for Android). But it will only last if people use it. Google+ has a great layout and the mobile app is one of most well built apps for social media. But it's currently dead in the water because nobody uses it. We'll see if MySpace can do the right marketing. They should probably wait until facebook makes their next big change to do the public launch. Catch the facebooks users while their grumpy from the change.
