MySpace Has Gone the Way of Entertainment
Last week, the almost-forgotten social media site MySpace got a makeover. The once profile-driven site has changed formats, perhaps for the better. The new look now features more content with a focus on entertainment for the 100 million users currently still using the space.
Users can still create and maintain personal profiles but the majority of the information and updates will pertain to celebrities, musicians, television shows and movies. Real-time data is presented based on user’s preferences. Trending topics on the site will be displayed in a ‘Right Now’ section where users can access up to the minute music and videos as they are added.
Content hubs have been created that act like dedicated pages for celebrity news, television and movie updates, and entertainment news. MySpace has partnered up with MTV, Access Hollywood, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Just Jared, and the Village Voice.
Resident experts will be on hand at the site to keep content fresh and updated as far as entertainment is concerned. As for the social aspect, MySpace is developing a system called ‘Reputation’ that rewards users with badges for their social networking activities concerning entertainment topics.
The new MySpace will continue operating in beta format but the new format should be available to all users in the world by the end of this month.
We use MySpace for our band because it’s an industry standard point of contact for promoters now so we have to but all the recent ‘improvements’ – flash type widgets & content etc make it sooo SLOW that we use it the minimum possible. Everything takes so long to do on it and half the time the applets don’t work at all – basic principle, the more complicated something is, the more things there are to go wrong with it. A lot of people have moved/are moving over to mobile broadband – many of them as their main/only net access now and, as it’s slightly slower than the cable/satellite/hardwired kind, MySpace might want to think about that. So many of our fans have told us that they get so frustrated waiting for even the initial band page to load that they just go straight to our Facebook page instead – less fancy maybe but more instant. MySpace is far better geared up for bands with much better content options but that advantage is totally lost when people have to wait so long to see it. There have been a few of these time-consuming flash type interfaces creeping into Facebook too lately though – hope they have the sense to keep them to a minimum…