The New Myspace: A first look and impressions

A while ago we told you about the new style Myspace that was going to be released at some point in the future and today is that day… welcome to the future.

Here at the Gadget Helpline we have a motley crew of creatives including designers, musicians, writers as well as a whole host of people who do fiddly creative things that we don’t quite understand. So it seems that we are the new Myspace target market and we were very happy to receive our invites to the new and improved Granddaddy of social media sites.

When you click on the ‘redeem invite’ button in your email you are taken to a sign-up page that asks you for all your usual social media details such as name, date of birth, email and the like, or you have the option to sign in using other social media websites like Facebook – This straight away shows that Myspace is looking to cater for a specific target audience and is not aiming to take on the big dog. You’re also asked to select a few words from a defined list to describe yourself; words like “musician”, “designer” and “writer”, which is again Myspace making it very clear that they are not looking to go against Facebook.

When this is all done you have your new Myspace profile and you can start interacting. You can post updates like you would on Facebook and you can ‘Connect’ to people, which is pretty much the same as following and being followed on Twitter. As you connect to more people, add more content and interact in other ways your profile page will start filling up.

There are hints of Facebook’s ‘Timeline’ feature here but your content is presented horizontally with a styling and layout that is reminiscent of both Windows 8 and Pinterest. It seems as if the creators of the new Myspace have definitely done their homework before creating a stylish but simplistic design that puts together some of the best aspects of social media across the web.

To start connecting with people, celebrities and musicians all you need to do is simply type their name from the homepage and Myspace does the rest – searching happens in real time as you type, and you don’t need to click in a search box to get going, just start typing. From there you will see any available artist pages, tracks and albums which you connect with or add to the music player on your page.

The music player itself is probably the best part of the new Myspace; part Spotify, part old style Myspace player and part radio. You can add tracks from artist pages, create a mixtape or you can just play an artist radio which will play all of their available tracks in a playlist. It has all the best aspects of Spotify in that you can discover new music, take a listen to songs recommended by contacts or listen to old favourites, all without having to pay a monthly fee or suffering from play limits or adverts. Myspace is looking to go all out in re-igniting an online music renaissance which Myspace itself kickstarted at the beginning of the Millennium.

Our first impressions of the new Myspace is that it is heading in the right direction, providing a portal for creative people to share, network and create a public profile for themselves the same way that Lily Allen and The Artic Monkeys did almost a decade ago. I for one will be watching how Myspace grows and develops with anticipation.

Have you tried out the new look Myspace yet? Let me know what you think by adding a comment below.

Source: Gadget Helpline