Myspace first teased their big redesign back in September, and the company is starting to let people in, sending out pre-launch invites to a select few. What follows is a quick first look at the new social network, which focuses heavily on music and discovery.
When you first create you account, you’ll be met with the New Myspace landing page, which allows you to post a status (Myspace asks “What’s the latest?”) and navigate to your stream, your music library, and your connections. Connections come in the form of people and songs. Once you “connect” to a song, it is added to your library (and you’re allowed to comment on the particular track). Once you “connect” with a person, you’ll start to see their updates in your stream.
When adding a new post, you have 150 characters to work with. You can also add photos and songs to your updates. To add a song, just click on the music notes icon and start typing – the instant search will find what you’re looking for, considering it’s a part of the library.
On the bottom of your screen is the player, where you can interact with all the music you discover on the site. You can create mixes, add to your connections, and launch radio based on certain tracks (similar to Pandora or Spotify).
That’s where you can access the “Discover” section as well, which lets users browse trending music, mixes, videos, radio, people, and articles. Like the preview suggested, the new layout is media rich with a heavy lean toward tiles and a new side-scroll that rewards widescreen displays.
Searching inside the new Myspace is pretty cool, in that all you have to do it start typing – from anywhere. Whether you’re on the homepage or another user’s profile, just start typing and the search screen will pop up:
Here’s an album page:
User profiles also sport the same side-scroll format, and feature a profile pic and a large background image. From a user’s profile, you can check out their top-artist, mixes, connections, photos, videos, etc.
Upon first look, it appears that the New Myspace sports some of the best elements of a streaming music service like Spotify or Pandora, and also adds a vast social networking layer on top of that. We knew that the redesign would focus heavily on music, and it does just that. They just started the limited distribution of invites for those that signed up early, so the network is far from densely populated as of right now. It’s a huge redesign, that’s for sure. It truly feels nothing like any version of Myspace that you’re familiar with. It looks great and UI shouldn’t be a problem for the site moving forward. Whether people will want to jump back on the Myspace train, no matter how impressive the redesign, is the big question.