Justin Timberlake is bringing Myspace back

By Matt Grippi

A sentence that once seemed implausible has now become a reality: I just signed into Myspace with my Facebook account.

For most people, Myspace is a distant memory of a prototypical social network that was basically a glorified blog with an obnoxious amount of customizability.

Now, years after Facebook and Twitter forced Myspace into obscurity, musician and actor Justin Timberlake has released a new version of the site. Despite the name, the site is nearly unrecognizable. Gone are the glittery backgrounds and annoying automatic profile songs. Instead, the new Myspace is going for a simplistic profile style, which asks for very little besides name, age, sex and a brief description of yourself. In fact, you can sign into the website with the click of a button using your Facebook or Twitter account, something that would seem insane to someone living through the social network wars of the early 2000s.

Myspace isn’t trying to compete with other social networks anymore. It’s trying to be “one more thing” instead of “the next thing.” As Google+ proved a few years ago, it is extremely difficult to convince people to jump ship to another system when they are so deeply invested in something else already.

The new Myspace homepage is made up of large tiles, each one representing a news story, band, movie trailer or music video. The tiles change depending on the user’s interests. The goal is to help users “discover” new things that they may like instead of simply viewing the things they already enjoy.

Timberlake has not been focusing on his music as much as he used to, but it is very clear that the new Myspace is music-oriented and hopes to compete with streaming options such as Spotify and Pandora.

The site aims to make sharing and discovering new music a social activity. Users create their own mixes and playlists that can be shared with their friends, while also being shown new artists and songs that may interest them. This is an interesting middle ground between Spotify, which primarily streams music that the users choose themselves, and Pandora, which plays music randomly based on a theme that the user chooses.

However, the big question here is whether or not people want to add another tab to their online social activity. With Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, Youtube, Pandora and more, it is likely that web users are already over-saturated with social options.

For now, it will be most useful to fans of the indie music scene, who can follow and discover lesser known bands easily and add and share new music to their “mix.” Indie bands may also have more success connecting with an audience if this format becomes a success.

We will have to wait and see if Myspace can really return from the grave as another website to check every day, or even take over for one we’ve already grown accustomed to. For now, it’s just another pretty time waster to click around while you’re supposed to be working.

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