New Myspace Launches

new myspace

I’m sure we all remember the days of organizing our top eight friends and going through countless HTML styles to make our MySpace pages stand out from the rest. Agonizing over what song would play when my friends visited my page was something I did on a daily basis.

But most of us probably haven’t logged onto MySpace in years. Ever since Facebook came on the scene, MySpace shed users, employees and revenue at an alarming rate. Justin Timberlake and Specific Media Group swooped in and jointly purchased the company in 2011.

The Web site went through a complete revamp and gradually rolled out invites to the public over the past few months. Yesterday Myspace finally went public to the whole world, but are the changes enough to alter people’s perceptions of the former social media giant?

Specific Media co-founder Chris Vanderhook thinks that negative stigma has been removed. He spoke with Mashable about how marketing campaigns are much more than overnight successes.

“We pay a lot of attention to what the sentiment is toward the brand, and when we acquired MySpace we were at over 90-percent negative,” he said. “But if you look on Twitter today, it’s over 80-percent positive.”

I mean, if anyone is going to turn around an image of a company, it’s Justin Timberlake. He seems completely incapable of not accomplishing what he wants to do.

Here’s the thing: the new Myspace looks fantastic. It’s leagues better than what it used to be. But there’s still one problem: nobody I know is using it.

I got into Myspace sometime last year because I expressed interest in being a beta tester. I had long ago deleted my old MySpace account (yes, it was very embarrassing), so I had to make a new one. The new interface was smooth and sleek, and gone were the numerous ads and horrifying HTML outlines.

But besides the new interface and overall improved user experience, Myspace still lacks a good amount of users. In order for me to visit a social network often, my friends have to be on it. That’s the reason why I use Facebook over Google+. Google+ is probably a better social network than Facebook, but because so few of my friends ever log onto it, I’m hardly ever on.

Myspace still has some pretty cool things going for it, though. For example, its iPhone app has a radio service, but instead of just copying Spotify and Pandora algorithms, users create their own radio stations. Since many Myspace users are musicians, tuning into Myspace radio is much more a personal experience than flipping on Pandora. You actually get to listen to what a professional DJ is spinning.

The jury is still out on the success of Myspace’s re-launch. With Justin Timberlake and Specific Media at the helm, the Web site seems to be in good hands, but it’s going to take a lot of effort if they’re ever going to overtake Facebook.