This article is more than 1 year old

Myspace mutates Windows 8 with new look

Video demo would do Redmond proud

Myspace* has released a video that shows off a new look that, at first glance, owes a fair bit to the design thinking behind Windows 8, with a dash of Pinterest thrown in for good measure.

The once-dominant social network, infamously acquired by Rupert Murdoch for US$580m in 2005 and then offloaded Specific Media for a paltry US$35m in 2011, has faded to near-irrelevance of late.

Your correspondent, in a previous professional life, chatted to a very senior executive from the network's Australian incarnation, who blamed the demise on three things.

The first was being based in Los Angeles, which is not exactly the best place on earth to hire coders.

The second was a reliance on Microsoft's .Net development platform, which he said made upgrades tricky at the time Myspace needed to make them. The third killer, he told us, was News Ltd culture, which didn't make for the kind of constant re-invention a social network needs.

The third problem seems to have gone away, as a notice on the site says “We’re hard at work building the new Myspace, entirely from scratch,” adding that is “staying true to our roots in one important way—empowering people to express themselves however they want.”

The video below shows all that empowerment goodness at work.

The new Myspace from Myspace on Vimeo.

The site also boasts a signup form and a promise that handing over your email address will result in the issuance of an invitation to join (re-join?) the site. Just when that will happen is not disclosed. ®

*Punctuation wonks may take exception at our capitalising Myspace's initial letter only. We've done so because the new version appears to have dropped the CamelCase incarnation of the name, while the ridiculous My_____ version has been consigned to history.

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