If you signed up for MySpace when the site first became popular but ditched it because it was cluttered and hard to use, you may want to give it another try. The site has undergone a major revamp that has gotten some positive reviews from people like Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch.
The design is much cleaner, with fewer tabs across the top of the homepage and drop-down menus for everything else. Navigation in general, has been completely revamped to reduce the number of clicks it takes to get to what members want.
Search has also been improved, ranking results based on your social graph (friends show up first). The new search is based on the open-source Lucene search engine. MySpaceTV has also been redesigned, with higher resolution video in 480p.
To see the changes illustrated in screenshots, check out The Guardian.
I’ll be curious to see whether the redesign helps MySpace gain some of the momentum it has lost to Facebook over the past year. Because I write about tech, I have an account but I almost never use it — not because I hate the interface but because all of my actual friends are on Facebook.
Even if I decide the new MySpace is much better than Facebook, it will never be my primary social network site unless it is so much better that my entire social graf makes the switch.
What we really need is compatible networks, so I can use whatever service I like for my homepage and interact with folks in any other service. That, of course, is the end goal of initiatives like Open Social, but Facebook isn’t playing ball.
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