It's been a while since I visited MySpace. The last time I'd really visited it was back in my Junior year of High School. I was kind of late to the MySpace party, and by the time I got there, most of my friends had moved on to Facebook, which was just starting to become the social networking site. As such, my time spent on Myspace back in 2005-2006 was brief, but my recent visit presented a much different experience than I remembered.
The way I remembered Myspace profiles was pretty similar to how I remembered ancient fan sites on Geocities and Homestead and Angelfire. All the terrible websites with clashing colors, overly-stimulating backgrounds, and an insane smattering of .gifs and "bumper sticker-esque" images that were seemingly picked at random. The kind of websites we talked about in lecture last week as characteristic of Web 1.0.
Returning now, I see... very much the same thing, but in a much neater format. The most noticeable difference between the new and old MySpace is that the new one is organized in a sort of compartmentalized, three-column layout with drop-in "apps" and games. Sections showing the posters of the profile owner's favorite movies or a stream of their recent status updates are clear analogues to the features on Facebook.
MySpace hasn't entirely emulated Facebook, though. One thing it's kept is the level of customization in terms of colors and styles that its had for as long as I've known. Unfortunately, people still don't necessarily understand how to make their page look less ugly than old MySpace. The pages continue to be plastered with random animated .gifs that look like the hideous airbrushed, glittered T-shirts sold at Wisconsin Dells gift shops.
Similar to amateur Web 1.0 design, backgrounds continue to be comprised of ill-fitting tiled images. Color schemes are largely picked as a grab-bag of colors the page designer likes, rather than what colors work well together. The new compartmentalized design of MySpace makes the pages of people with strange color choices easier to read, but the problem is still there.
MySpace has clearly made a concerted effort to grab back some of the market it's lost to Facebook. It seems that it's still largely going to be a site for primarily band profiles,but the redesign, along with the inclusion of news items and integration with IGN to create a sort of "all-in-one" experience, is definitely a step in the right direction of rivaling Facebook.
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