The new Myspace from Myspace on Vimeo

Justin Timberlake may have played Sean Parker in The Social Network, but he’s had a real-life social networking role to play as an investor as Myspace (sans intercapitalized S) showed off its new look yesterday.
   And I like it.
   After being frustrated with another attempt at ordering photos in a Facebook album (viz. it doesn’t work any more), seeing that fan page views had gone way down (as Facebook forces us to pay for promoted statuses), and noticing that I was largely using Facebook as a glorified version of Digg, it dawned on me: there must be a better way. As I told Facebook in a survey tonight:

These are actually reasons to leave Facebook or to find an alternative—and right now, the MySpace reboot is looking way better. Facebook is little more to me than a glorified Digg now where I share some bookmarks, but not where I share my real statuses. And we all know what happened to Digg.

It’s a slight exaggeration as some of my closer friends get some status updates, but the majority come via Twitter, and that’s plugged in to my Facebook.
   Twitter, too, no longer has the effectiveness it once had in itself, unless you are directly contacting someone.
   About the only newer (2007 and on) platform I get any pleasure out of is Tumblr, but that’s not what I call a social network.
   It’s funny, because one year ago, I was raving about Facebook Timeline. How Facebook gave me instant gratification through “likes” and how it looked so clever. But then, as with the Oldsmobile Toronado, designers tinkered with it. They added unnecessary features, such as the second friends’ box. Anything that was ingenious about the original Timeline, such as the way it could guess your most significant past moments, disappeared or was pushed down—or rendered useless. The fact that fan pages still don’t update on the 1st of each month—a bug that existed when Facebook first created Timeline—suggests to me that the company doesn’t really care any more about the user experience. It’s all about the money, and when that happens, the lovin’ feeling’s gone—just as it had with Google, which I also used to rave about.
   While the pundits are saying that Myspace is great because it focuses on music, they are missing the other angle. Based on the preview, it’s a visual delight. It makes updating your social network look good, and you have a fleeting moment of pride as you see the next status go live. We’re so spoiled with technology now that we like those experiences—and the new Myspace user interface, created by Australian firm Josephmark, captures that part of us. I can dig updating in News Gothic.
   Freed from the clutches of the Murdoch Press, Myspace might come good again—at the perfect time as Facebook fatigue—and even a bit of Twitter fatigue—sets in. I never thought I would say that.
   I just hope the new management keep the website clean: don’t do a Facebook.
   And I still have more friends on Myspace than I do on Google Plus, so I am starting from a bigger number than I did on Facebook all those years ago.—Jack Yan, Publisher