San Francisco — Reverting back to its roots of being a place to discover and share music, last weekend social networking site MySpace has rolled out an upgraded global events and calendar platform that allows both artists and fans to create, promote, manage, share and discover events across the ailing social network.
Called MySpace Events, it anticipates to be “a global events and calendar platform providing users with fresh tools to create, discover, share, and control events across MySpace and multiple social networks.”
MySpace Events takes advantage from the deep association that MySpace has with artists and will organize a catalog of music and cultural events and will include a recommendation engine for concerts, sports, nightlife, and the arts along with calendar events from MySpace and Facebook friends.
Each event emerges inside the user’s MySpace calendar, including any from Facebook thanks to a growing implementation of Facebook Connect; and they can be shared on their MySpace Stream, Facebook pages, on Twitter, and via tiny url.
This, MySpace hopes, will attract in new interest from advertisers wanting to promote an event (be it concert, TV premiere, movie release, etc) in a new way that reaches users by placing a sponsored event directly inside the social calendar. When a user RSVPs they then also promote the sponsored event to their MySpace friends.
“Our users already post millions of events to MySpace each year and the events platform is the next step in empowering them to discover, create and socialize around the events that are most relevant to them,” said Jason Hirschhorn, co-president of MySpace.
“MySpace Events allows users to search for events of every size, from a local concert to the next Lakers game to Jay-Z’s tour, and then pushes it a step forward by providing the choice to easily share the event and even purchase tickets.”
Key features include the following:
- A new social and pop culture calendar that “combines your friends’ events, your events, events from your favorite artists, with pop culture events and sponsored events.”
- Ability to buy concert tickets directly from an artist’s profile.
- “Social advertising,” wherein advertisers can purchase ad space inside users’ social calendars.
- Cross-plaform event viewing in which a user’s MySpace calendar includes Facebook events. “We are providing features to share events on MySpace via the Stream and across the web including on Facebook, Twitter, and tiny url.”
Myspace says in the coming months…it will incorporate additional features including mobile access, concert notifications and film releases.
“Ultimately our goal is to build a destination that enables users to organize their entire social calendar online through MySpace,” said Marcus Womack, Director of Events and Ticketing for MySpace. “Also, we are providing artists with advanced tools to help connect with fans and promote their shows while conversely enabling fans to quickly and easily discover, share and purchase tickets to those shows.”