A little over a year ago, investors Chris and Tim Vanderhook and Justin Timberlake, the MySpace-era recording artist, purchased MySpace, a website that your grandparents used to share pixelated n00dz of themselves in messy eyeliner and teased scene hair on. How we laughed at the time. Ho ho ho. Myspace, we chortled, before drifting off into a catatonic state of indifference that our social-networking-destroyed attention spans mandate. For real though, have you logged into MySpace lately? Place is grim. The last time I did I got accosted by a hobo in spiked football pads pushing a shopping cart full of batteries and cans of beans.
Maybe things are about to start turning around because a few thousand Facebook privacy controversies later, including this one from yesterday, and it appears the once seemingly indomitable social network is starting to look a little ripe for the overthrow? Turns out they’re actually going through with the relaunch of MySpace, those crazy scamps. Man, I really wish I had a few hundred million to flush down the toilet.
Competing with Facebook might not even be the plan, however. As they explained, they intend it to serve as a platform for artists and musicians and the like to interact with fans.
“In a single sentence, it’s a social network for the creative community to connect to their fans,” Tim Vanderhook said. “We’re going after artists, right after this we’ll be talking to various artists to come on the platform. We want to give them a chance to help build it with us. We’re really far along, but we really want that last twenty percent to really be crafted by more people like Justin that actually know the tools and things that they need.” Hollywood Reporter
That’s a refreshing change of pace, because it was starting to feel like there weren’t enough avenues out there already for famous people to let us know what kind of shoes they are wearing.
The new interface, which you can check out in a preview video below, definitely seems more in line with the contemporary social media zeitgeist than Facebook, with a sort of Pinterest/Tumblresque, horizontal scrolling feel. Strangely, it seems like you’re supposed to log in to the new MySpace using your Facebook or Twitter account, which feels a little like logging in to your wife’s vagina through your girlfriend’s, but I don’t really fully grasp what the business plan is here yet, so maybe there’s something to it.
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