Talks have recently turned to the once trendy and dominating social network site MySpace. Preparations have been taking place for the sites return next year which Specific Media, the new owners, have promised users a bigger and better site. Focusing on music, movies and the fans – it believes that “artists are really tired of sending their fans over to one platform to listen to music, another to watch a social stream, and a different place to watch videos, buy merchandise or even purchase tickets”. The owners seem very convinced and it seems they are planning for a huge success. However, it has to be pretty good if they are preparing to dominate the social media world again!
I remember as a teen, the two big social sites that we used religiously were MSN chat and MySpace. MySpace was definitely the new big thing for my generation however, over the years it has received a lot of criticism, and the spotlight has turned to other social media platforms as it failed to innovate. I have to say it is going to be interesting to see how the new beta version will take to music fans, musicians existing and potential users, and will it welcome back old users?
A few pros and cons of MySpace as we know it:
1. MySpace was the birthplace of those hideous profile pictures that we still witness on Facebook.
2. It started a trend where users can collect friends in once place and choose their favourites (not all REAL friends)
3. You have a choice to customise your background profile.
4. A profile song will start playing every time you visit a another person’s site
5. It was the first huge social network site for music lovers to listen, share and learn more about their favourite bands.
6. The irritating constant messages from bands getting you to connect to their profile pages.
The new site definitely looks a lot more user friendly than the previous version. The site centres on the use of great graphics and stunning visuals, it has new features like a player which sits at the bottom of the page, letting you sort your playlist and listen to songs. It is obvious to see that they have taken inspiration from a mix of Twitter, Facebook, Spotify and Pinterest combining them all in one. Is that what we need, one big social site instead of several different ones? It will make things a lot easier, but if this hits off would it mean deleting your Facebook and Twitter accounts? I know I would find it that hard to do as I have had years of photos and contacts to delete and add again.
With all this in mind it may not become THE best social network site, but the promises and expectations that have been set it has a pretty good chance at least within its competitors i.e. Spotfiy.
So if you’re interested you can request for an invitation here.
And see for yourself if MySpace is going to be the next huge hit in 2013.
