MySpace Is Poised To Release Major Site Redesign
“News Corp. is accelerating its efforts to wring more ad coin out of MySpace.”
The social-networking behemoth MySpace is set to release a major redesign of its website and tech functions next week, including upgrades to its navigation, user-profile editing and search applications as well as an overhauled MySpaceTV vid player, company representatives said late Thursday evening.
“An official release is planned to go out on Monday, and the first new features will show up on the site on Wednesday, June 18.”
The News Corp.-owned social-networking site also is revising its profile editor to make customization easier, while a new navigation bar provides easy access to messaging, friends and other community features from wherever users are, not just on the home page.
Redesign, the first major overhaul since the site’s launch in January 2004, is aimed at keeping MySpace hip on the tech side at a time when it is facing stiffer competition from Facebook, Bebo and others in the social-networking sector. The changes also increase exponentially the advertising opportunities throughout the site and on the MySpaceTV player.
The redesign project has been underway for over six months, with the goals of appealing to a broader demographic and letting users interact with the site more (i.e. keeping them around), and has involved in-home studies for testing purposes.
The re-launch of the homepage proper has been kept somewhat under wraps, likely because a “major” advertiser is set to take over the site when it debuts. But MySpace has been liberal with the details of most of the other new improvements.
Search capabilities are being improved, for instance, with results on other users, music, video, the general MySpace site and the Web at large sorted into separate tabs. The most relevant tab will be automatically highlighted, and searches on other users will include the ability to filter by location, gender or age and invite them to be friends.
The MySpace profile editing tool, for example, has been modified so that HTML expertise is less of a precondition. A sidebar lets users browse through themes and alter them with a color palette, rather than hard-coding changes.
Changes to the MySpaceTV player include features that will make it easier for MySpace members to embed and share vids, which technically competes with YouTube, has been improved to support high-definition video and improved full-screen mode as part of the Flash 9 release. Its expanded functions allow MySpace members to recommend vids to like-minded members and to highlight the most-viewed vids throughout MySpace.
MySpace ranks among the five most trafficked U.S. websites. Its monthly average has hovered at about 73 million unique visitors so far this year, according to comScore.
MySpace’s chief rival, Facebook, is also set to unveil a redesigned profile page in the near future; developers on its application platform are already testing it out. MySpace’s redesign does not appear to alter the experience for developers who are building on its OpenSocial-compatible platform.
Tom Anderson, MySpace’s co-founder and president, said the changes are part of an ongoing effort to shatter any perception that the site is only for teens and young adults. That meant finding ways to make it easier for the average Internet user to customize their personal profiles and find features like classifieds that might have gotten lost in the clutter.
“We felt like we reached a point where MySpace in its original incarnation had peaked in a way,” Anderson said in an interview. “We were wondering how we can expand our market and appeal to new people. We looked at some of the reasons why someone might not use MySpace.”
MySpace said a single advertiser will “take over” the home page on Wednesday, with the rest of the redesign and new elements bowing Thursday. MySpace additionally has a data portability project, “Data Availability,” on the way.