MySpace gets a Makeover and Facebook Mashup

I have updated my MySpace profile now for the first time in about 3 years or more. I rarely use my MySpace Profile, although I use MySpace a whole lot for checking out the latest releases from my many favourite bands.

MySpace has just recently gone through one amazing upheaval - I love the brand evolution, the - my [_____] - ident / motif is genius. The new look and feel is fantastic, and the new Facebook Mashup feature is equally inspired. As MySpace CEO Mike Jones explains:

“We are thrilled to further our collaboration with Facebook through Mashup with Facebook. This new feature is a great illustration of our strategy around social entertainment and enabling the real-time stream. The stream is one of our most popular features on Myspace, and it is now delivering an even richer entertainment experience of relevant content for our users to enjoy. I’m particularly excited because so many people will be able to have the immediate satisfaction of enjoying their own entertainment program that they have customized themselves as well as connecting to all their passions and to the Myspace community at large.”

MySpace’s customisation / templating wizard is also much better, and all in all the User experience is about 100% improved.

I’m still not convinced how much ’action’ it will take away from Facebook, as I still believe Facebook has a myriad of advantages over MySpace. I will of course continue to utilise the ’Music’ space on MySpace - I don’t believe I will really be doing much with my own Profile area though.

This of course raises the larger questions about syncing information between different profiles - and how you decide on how to store said information and prioritise different categories and likes, and which information you actually copy / sync across - do you every override preferences?

At Comrz, we are about to introduce our new Affino ’Proto Accounts’ functionality which allows users to connect / utilise login / registration details from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter - with OpenID to follow in the next release. Affino really pushes the envelope for what information is captured on a User Profile basis; we will be following up that exercise with the ’Content Streaming’ -type features found on Facebook, and which are being partially integrated into the MySpace experience.

There are still some oddities on the Internet with way too many ’Standards’ for APIs and Integration. It is heartening though to see that MySpace is aligning itself to Facebook - at Comrz, we are backing Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and OpenID to be the leading standards in Social Networking user account sharing - of course it will be interesting to see how all this pans out, and if MySpace has now done enough to start building again, and once more become a viable Social space alongside Facebook and Twitter.