Have you noticed the totally new redesign of MySpace? If not, I highly suggest you go check it out. With recent talk of Myspace being in serious trouble, is this complete redesign their last ditched attempt to stay alive? The redesign even encompasses their logo, which has changed to a My____, and a cool little feature is that if you hover over the ‘space’, different flash animation appears on various pages throughout the site. In the past 18-24 months, a high percentage of people using Myspace have been bands and models. The new Myspace clearly caters for this market, with much more of a music and movie focus.
For all of those worried about the trouble of having to manage both a Facebook and a Myspace account, Myspace have catered for that by introducing features to automatically connect Myspace to Facebook, pulling in interests based on your Facebook personal profile. To do this, head to the sign up page, there's an option where you are able to sign in using your Facebook login. The next step, you will be asked if you want to import basic information and interests from your Facebook profile. In about 5 seconds later, you will be presented with a list of 10 Celebrities, 10 Movies, 10 Music Artists and 10 TV shows MySpace found based on your interests. This ability to pull Facebook data quickly into another website presents many opportunities in the future. With the widespread use of social signals, such as the Facebook ‘Like’ buttons that are very obvious these days throughout websites such as online stores and blogs, and knowing what individuals like in terms of what they purchase, their interests and what they read- is information any company would find very valueable. What could this mean to businesses? The explosive use of social signals could be a way to customise how websites would appear in search results. Search engines could become more intelligent and know what sites you would prefer to read over other sites. This idea of social search may become something that you will need to keep an eye on in the near future, and even be Google's way of getting the data that is so hard to get from Facebook. Will these changes to MySpace be enough to get you using your old account?
