The revamped space that is MySpace

The change in the design and functioning of MySpace, the premier social networking site, was long overdue. The portal’s fan following and popularity plummeted to an all time low somewhere during the month of September. However, the mood is upbeat at the social community centre that is MySpace as the designers and programmers prepare for a structural shift in the focus and working of the portal. MySpace is one of the units owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation that dominated the domain of social networking before Facebook and Twitter emerged to take the lion’s share of the market pie.

The initial focus of the site was to enable its members to easily share their favorite music, videos and movies and popularize the new trends in the field of entertainment. With incoming competition from Facebook and Twitter, MySpace tried to incorporate some of their social networking features, in turn deviating from its core competencies. Michael Jones, the President of MySpace acknowledges this fact without reluctance and indicates a going back to the initial roots, when the focus was on infotainment. The designing unit plans to remove all the clutter and chaos that has crept into the space over the years and regain its lost position.

The new revamped site will target the generation Y, those between ages 13 and 35. It will satisfy their need for social entertainment but maintains that it is not here to compete with Facebook but to complement its social networking services. The process of restoring the dwindling sales and declining popularity is not going to be an easy one, the analysts claim. Nevertheless, it is the only option MySpace has, apart from sitting back and watching itself go out of business.  Its ad revenue is expected to decrease by an estimated 40%, from $470 million in 2009 to $297million in 2011. Facebook will see a hike of more than 75% in its overall ad revenue during the same period.

The management shifts and changes at MySpace contributed towards aggravating the problem until Mr. Jones resumed office as the President of MySpace early in 2010. He intends to capitalize upon the popularity of the site in the entertainment world in order to accumulate advertisement revenue. Currently, only 24 percent of the total advertisements on the World Wide Web are advertised on MySpace, while Facebook accounts for whopping 62 percent of them.

The new logo design that was unveiled last week looked something like this: “my____”. Where many stalwarts tried to figure out the intended meaning of the logo, it was not difficult for a novice to figure out that “____” stood for ‘space’ as in ‘MySpace’. Michael Jonas explains the logic behind the logo: the space represents the space people will enjoy on the site, which they can customize according to their own needs and fashion it in their own style. The social network analysts welcomed the change expressing optimism about the strategies of MySpace.

Posted by Matt Prior on Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010. Filed under Internet, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry