This September 26th article by The Guardian details the recent re-branding of Myspace. I’ll take a second to summarize its main points before presenting my take on the story.

• Advertising agency Specific Media bought Myspace for $35m; seven years ago, the site was worth $580m.
• Specific Media is branding Myspace as a “social network for the creative community”; its website boasts that “the new Myspace puts the power to express yourself back in your hands.”
• The new Myspace will allow users to login using existing sites (read: Facebook) and will even port over data from other social networks (read: Facebook) to give users a running start.
• Myspace Music will remain part of the site, but it will feature big-label artists and appears to be more commercialized, post-revamp.

My first reaction to this was incredulity… quickly changing to disgust… and fading to a more mild, “well, that’s funny.” Simply put, I have no faith in Specific Media’s ability to make good on their claims and help Myspace rise from the dead.

For one, recreating a social network that has long been an enabler of creative expression requires a solid commitment to the act of creative expression itself. The full-screen interface of the new Myspace may gleam with the aura of a whitewashed artist’s canvas, but it is not what it appears to be. It primarily functions as a layer on top of Facebook, which is nonsensical for obvious reasons. Facebook is already a layer on top of the Internet; Myspace is then a lacquer painted on a perfectly functional table-top. Why transfer your social life to a service run by an ad agency… that offers little more than a glossy view of your Facebook media… minus the ability to tap into photos of your friends, family, and acquaintances (who probably won’t be on Myspace anyway)?

True, the new Myspace is heavily music-based, allowing users to create mixes, share songs, listen to radio stations, and watch music videos (and, of course, share all such actions in a News Feed-esque central hub). Unfortunately, Myspace is late to the party. Much of its social music-sharing functionality duplicates that of Spotify, the (mostly) free music streaming and sharing utility that exploded last year (and it integrates well with Facebook). And music videos? We have something called YouTube for that.

An artists’ canvas, the new Myspace is not. But I have no doubts that Specific Media has made it very simple for small bands to create polished, if pigeonholed, profiles and market themselves to fans using the site’s music integration. Some bands will make use of the site’s services, I’m sure. The problem here is the same as the previous issue, though: easy-to-use artist-oriented websites have been popping up like crazy, and indie bands have many eminent options to choose from: Bandcamp, for marketing music, ReverbNation, for advertising shows and networking, and Facebook Pages, which groups of all caliber use energetically to reach out to audiences.

My final doubt about the new Myspace’s model is the most fundamental. Where Facebook lists a user’s “friends,” Myspace lists “people.” The differences between a friend-based architecture that emulates reality and a fan-based architecture that wishes it represented reality are stark. Consider: the new Myspace chose to use a venn diagram symbol to represent a user’s contacts (“people”) on the site. Unfortunately (or justly), it seems that Myspace will be firmly seated in the grey area between the aloofness of Twitter and the intimacy of Facebook… forever behind the times, and forever estranged.

As an end note, for those of you out there who enjoy good (relevant) humor: check out XKCD’s “Map of the Internet.”