MySpace will overhaul its website starting June 18, 2008, giving media a sneak peek into the major changes of its splash page, profile editor, search function and more. MySpace president Tom Anderson said “this is just the beginning.”
Digital Journal — MySpace announced a plan to clean up various elements of its social network, beginning on Wednesday. It will clean up its homepage and add tabbed search results. The revamped MySpace TV player will support HD and feature several new useful tools.
The makeover begins next week and will roll out throughout next week, MySpace says.
The global redesign is being touted by MySpace as a way to let users “more intuitively navigate throughout the site and better communicate with their family and friends around the world.” So if you’re a MySpace user, what are the major improvements?
For the first time in its history, MySpace is redesigning the homepage. There is less clutter and boxes, and MySpace has added richer blues to the page’s colour palette. The top box heavily promotes MySpace’s apps program and the navigation links at the top have been cut down to five, as opposed to the current 14.
Search is also getting supercharged: it will be tabbed, so you don’t need to search multiple times for different results. As the press release states: “Search will have improved filtering by location and added relevancy to search algorithms.” If you search for a friend name Craig, for instance, MySpace will search through your Friends first instead of dumping the chaos of search results you’re accustomed to.
The profile editor will be easier to use, treating members to expanded customization tools and a “theme library offering color, borders, and images to choose from.”
Also turning heads is the announcement of a tweaked MySpace TV player: it will feature full-screen mode, HD support, other languages, and tools such as volume memory and scrubber.
Tom Anderson, president of MySpace, said this overhaul is just a taste of what the site will be doing to improve MySpace sessions:
By the early autumn we expect to reveal an entirely new and remixed MySpace that provides more a more intuitive, customizable, and private experience.
MySpace is the U.S. market leader in social networks, boasting 72 million monthly uniques compared to Facebook’s 36 million. Both websites attract around 115 million people monthly.
