Myspace previews complete redesign
new.myspace.com
new.myspace.com
Ironically Opera was the one who proposed the <video>-tag which this site uses for it's rotating LP, in 2007. [1] Way to exclude users.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5_video#History_of_.3Cvideo...
It's condescending comments like these that give HN a bad name. Let me know when you redesign a large social site like MySpace and then we'll talk.
a) You don't really use HN that often b) You're accessing HN from your grandpa's computer on IE3 c) You work for a REALLY big corporation
If you chose a) or b), there's still hope! Just smile ( :-) ) and you'll soon be enjoying HN like it's '96
Personally I use Firefox as my main browser but that's because their web dev tools won me over first and now I'm entrenched.
Sync between a very good mobile and a desktop browser would seem to be a good reason - if their Android browser didn't force close on me so much I'd be tempted towards using Opera on the desktop for non-dev stuff.
and i know, this demo doesn't use it and will work fine in opera if you spoof the UA, but it's a lot easier to develop if you pick a feature set you're going to support, and skim out any browsers that don't support that feature set.
Overall support will include specific feature testing, regression testing, and user testing. Additionally, support tickets may be opened and introduce support costs in ticket management, escalation, and assessment.
Eventually people will start spoofing just to get in, and then you have a much worse problem in your hands. You know the Opera story. There is no excuse to block user agents unless it's commercial software with support contracts on the line.
All it takes to detect websockets is:
if ('WebSocket' in window) { /* Web Sockets supported / } else { / Web Sockets not supported */ }
Ironically, this was taken from:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introducing-web-sockets/
Also, every web developer with half a brain can use https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js instead of locking out users unnecessarily by matching the User-Agent.
I'm picking on websockets because that's what's been annoying me at work lately, but it's just an example. the myspace demo doesn't even use websockets, it's totally irrelevant, but websocket support is a good cursory indication of whether or not it is a modern browser, and therefore how much development time will be added by officially supporting it.
After all, Myspace has a commonly-used bug reporting functionality.
> complain loudly to their friends
Because they won't complain about being locked out?
What does showing a message "Our superpowers have detected you're using an outdated browser. That must mean: a - You don't use the Internet very often. b - You're at your parents' place on the PC they bought in 1996. c - You work for the government or a big corporation." to users using a browser released in the past month stand up for, other than ignorance?
They are not enabled by default, that's all. So it's not just that the message is snarky and insulting, it reflects ignorance as well.
From: http://www.opera.com/press/faq/
"How many people are using Opera? Today, more than 275 million people are using Opera every month."
I'd rather see a number of users who have set it as their default browser.
If 10% of the world's Internet users are on Opera, where are they?
That said, our own traffic shows 0.80% Opera users, which puts it just above RockMelt. It's silly to actively filter them out as MySpace is doing here, but would be equally as silly (for us at least) to devote any resources to dealing with any Opera-specific issues, until the usage stats justify it.
So if you run US-focused site, there isn't really reason to care about Opera, and test for it. Blocking it (or any other browser) is bad though.
The "historical reasons": Opera was by any means the best (serious) browser out there, but it was paid. People in these countries weren't paying for software anyway, because their income was well bellow western standards while prices were same, and as a bonus, there was no one who would care. So while someone on the west would rather use something free (like IE), people in (for example) Ukraine picked the best. That's why first decent browser (Firefox) took over the west so fast.
Looking at hits is doing it wrong - profit is where it's at, what proportion of profits come from Opera users.
[For example, hypothetically, they might be highly paid trend setters and amount for a disproportionately large profit share on a fashion site or such.]
That's not counting those Opera users who switched their User-Agent string to MSIE or similar because of stupid JS detection like MySpace's.
$ curl -i --user-agent 'Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.10.289 Version/12.02' https://new.myspace.com/
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
X-Powered-By: Express
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html
Location: https://new.myspace.com/browser
X-Response-Time: 1ms
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 22:53:34 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
<p>Moved Temporarily. Redirecting to <a href="https://new.myspace.com/browser">https://new.myspace.com/browser</a></p>And is only going to get worse, with WebGL is not just "Sorry your browser is not supported, please download a different one.", but "Your video card drivers are not supported, buy new hardware and/or install a different Operating System"
Turn off Flash and see how many sites require it (because of bad codec choice / lack of alternative ways of viewing embedded videos, because of crappy ads without fallback images so you get popups/warnings about missing plugins etc.).
This is a ridiculous idea, and a ridiculous comment. I'm a web developer and I'm so excited about making awesome things and the fact that the web is evolving and enabling us to do this, and share our creations with the world. People like you and comments like this drive me crazy.
That being said, I don't think that you should just put up a blanket disabled site announcement when it's not necessary (as is the case with opera here), but if your computer or browser is actually missing capabilities because it's too old, that's too bad - you just don't get cool things. Upgrade or move on.
Straw man.
>This is a ridiculous idea, and a ridiculous comment.
He didn't propose anything, just stated the problem. You're the one putting words in his mouth and jumping to overwrought conclusions.
Relax dude.
Sane and simple standards that can be implemented in any platform without requiring hundreds of man years of effort.
Nothing done in the web today is particularly technically advanced, we are about the same UI level as standard apps were more than 10 years ago (hell, I doubt you can build a photo manipulation app today that can compete with where Photoshop was 10 years ago).
Most of the complexity burden the web has is purely gratuitous and product of how flawed the standards it is built on are.
How JSON replaced XML is a good illustration of what is the right direction to go. Now if for example JavaScript was replaced with something considerably simpler, like, say, Scheme, instead of trying to bolt even more OO-crud into it and turn it into another pseudo-Java, that would be another good step.
There is little doubt the DOM and CSS could be dramatically simplified without reducing functionality, same goes for HTTP (as a recent post to hacker news illustrated).
To think that some people are actualy getting paid to make submitting and retrieving data using web overly complicated and annoying is one of those things I try not to think about. The standards idea clearly is not working if it is being interpreted as a mandate for needless complexity to keep web developers entertained. Instead we hear web developers complain that standards are being ignored because some browser will not support their desired gratuitious complexity. I would say they've lost the plot but I'm not sure there ever was a sane plot to begin with.
...then you argue that we should replace javascript with another language, and that would improve "best viewed in" problems? The kinds of changes you are proposing here would make the same issues you complained about 1000x worse. "Sorry, we wrote this in python, so you have to upgrade your browser, because it only runs javascript". This would immediately invalidate all old browsers, rather than slowly upgrading the tools we already have. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation is how it goes when upgrading, you can't just make vast and rash changes like this.
It's great that you are thinking this way, but you have a lot more thinking to go, and a lot more research before you start posting comments like this.
> I'm a web developer
Things were of course different if it was a paid service (where users can post demands) or Facebook (where the market penetration is so high they can't afford to forgo non Chrome/FF) but in Myspace's case, I think their decision is completely understandable.
We made the same decision for our site (not yet up) and our user base is way more conservative than Myspace's. We just don't have the resources to do pretty and cross-browser, so we'll have to do with FF and Chrome only.
For example, I support a few websites aimed at farmers. The sites are simple and degrade gracefully, because farmers tend to use older technology; small, because farmers don't typically have access to broadband internet; and mobile-friendly, because data access via cell phone is often more reliable for them than a consumer internet connection. These sites are not impressive, but they suit their purpose and their audience. So, obviously, the technology choice can go backwards as well.
Side-note: one of my favorite games is "breaking" websites by opening them in IE8 and reloading them with "Compatibility Mode" turned on.
What started the original "best viewed with" problems of the 90s? It was largely due to the lack of compliance with standardization. Every browser had its own buggy way to render content, often slightly different from the equally buggy ways that the competition rendered content. Most web devs at the time were undisciplined and lazy and they tended to use a standard reference browser as a guide for creating their layouts. This led to the insanity of sites that looked fine in one browser but were broken in others, typically due to accidentally making use of rendering bugs.
Now things are completely different. Standards compliant rendering is the norm for all of the most popular browsers. The issue today isn't basic compatibility as it was in the 90s it is now features. In order to push the state of the art in terms of new features on the web it will be necessary for some sites to remind their users that not every browser supports the features their site is built on.
And what's with the condescending list? Excuse my vulgarity but the page managed to be insulting, clueless, and factually inaccurate all at the same time. Here's how it reads to me:
a) Fuck you.
b) Fuck you.
c) Yes I do, a big technology company where I can install whatever software I need working on harder technical problems than getting Myspace working cross-browser and I use Opera at home too so fuck you.
I like it when larger, more corporate sites go for an informal tone, even if they don't completely nail the humour they might have been striving for. It's a better direction overall than a stuffy PR-speak message, and getting bent out of shape about it just seems like an overreaction.
Obviously they could have written a paragraph of text explaining that, but just saying "something you are using is so old that it is lame (in the duck sense, not in the teenage slang sense), here's how to fix it" gets the job done in one sentence.
This isn't a business website, this is a social network that gets most of their traffic from bands now. I can't fathom how the smallest amount of snark about IE8 being old on a product like this is raising so much anger on the HN community.
Do you think you are in MySpace's target market?
Here is another possible explanation: they aren't some kind of master marketers who unfailingly target their niches and never fail in such attempts.
Why do you think advertisers like snark?
As publishing site you had to shoot for the lowest common denominator in order to reach the most customers. That is still a good strategy, sites that can shrug off features that aren't supported but still get the message across. Maybe MySpace will get that message.
Their market share has been under 1% for years, so it's really not worth any website worrying about.
Except when it wasn't, right? Sorry, but this is a complete lie.
One point, you can tell this is a total work in progress/concept, and that the UI is also most likely staged at this point.
(I make this observation based on the fact that every post had "12 Connects", "3 Comments" and "2 Shares". Surely if you put this much effort into production of a video you would change these numbers?)
Anyway, features which I picked up from the video...
- Photo Sharing/Uploading
- Heavy Emphasis on Music
- Insights/Stats for presumably Bands
- Radio
- Some weird feature called "affinity" that matches your online identity to Justin Timberlake?
In the final shot, It also looked like Instagram filters were applied to every profile picture?
As expected, MySpace is clearly placing a heavy emphasis on a community driven around bands and music. But, I just fail to see how they are going to get a strong user base, just considering most/all bands are content and happy with Facebook and integration with the vast supply of Band Related apps...
I don't think it says that all. The last thing I do when designing a page is hook it up to a data source.
Nothing in this video looks that difficult to implement. Difficult to make cross-browser compatible, most likely.
If they're going to put a focus in any area, for a redesign, it seems like music is the ticket.
As far as website designs go, this preview is stunning, even if it is just a mockup.
You mean distribution agencies have an affection for it. Myspace has been around forever, so it comes up high on Google, so the guys in charge of putting St. Vincent's music online maintain her Myspace account in addition to her Facebook, iTunes, etc. The artists themselves don't really care, they just want to be everywhere that ears and eyeballs are.
As far as this preview goes, it looks very much like Windows 8. You can tell there's people still just throwing money at the Myspace name, which surprises me. I thought it was pretty much a dead brand.
I think they face stiff competition from soundcloud. But a big problem with soundcloud is the amount of spammy bands that comment on songs and the lack of casual listeners like on myspace.
Autoplaying music on any page, even a bands is a bad idea.
I still don't have a Facebook user - and myspace worked for me all the time without a user, but Facebook didn't work. It's the - "hey there is a show with some bands I don't know, let's go on Myspace and check them quickly out" - that Myspace excelled in. No login, just listening to some of their songs, maybe watch some pics, check out their tour dates and that's it.
But they have lost their edge - now everyone is on FB. But most of the bands still have a (mostly) unused Myspace profile.
Just because the UI is staged, it doesn't mean they won't be able to execute on it- matter of fact, with a team the size of myspace's, they'll likely do execute, and execute it well.
You mentioned that the video clearly used test data, but seemed to forget that when mentioning the affinity feature.
Maybe they sync people's instagram photos on their myspace profile.
Point being, give Myspace a fair change. They're certainly not the new kid on the block, are experienced, and this seems like a good new effort.
Why not some integration with Pandora, where you can create user specific radio stations based off of the band's Myspace profile, that is also linked to their tour schedule etc etc?
Then all Pandora users who have a station created from that band can be notified either though a push notification or e-mail when they are playing a club within a 30 mi radius?
Integrating with the current Pandora userbase would fix the "how will they build a userbase?" and then Pandora would have another venue to access unsigned bands that they can promote through their Music Genome Project.
Just a thought off the top of my head.
The new MySpace is very much a music product. It has a fresh, crisp interface and it's smooth, sexy & fast. It's the fastest and best performing MySpace by far. What you see is the impressive work of the MySpace development team who have done an amazing job at taking ambitious designs and turning them into something captivating and interactive.
Don't judge the site people until you try it. From a developer perspective, I think most people here on HN will appreciate how technologically advanced and smooth the new MySpace is which has been built from the ground up when it's launched. As you can see it's more than a mere re-skinning of the old MySpace code base.
Great work!
It looks stunning I hope it works as well as it looks cause that is probably more important than the visual aesthetics.
Visually I think it's rather pleasing. It's different and the horizontal scrolling might not be everyone's cup of tea, but screens seem to be getting wider so it makes sense that sites start adopting a more horizontal oriented approach to web design to accommodate larger resolution screens.
I do find it kind of ironic the design team use Mac's and people are saying that the new MySpace looks like it got inspiration from the Windows 8 Metro / People Hub, haha.
It seems very tablet like. Side scrolling isn't a big deal on a touch device. Not sure how I'd like it in a browser with a mouse that only scrolls one way, but the video looks nice at least.
It's probably an alignment issue with my brain scrabbling to differentiate content.
I'm also a fan of paging over scrolling. So it will be interesting to feel how this works. Perhaps scrolling with the finger lets you focus better than scrolling with the keyboard or pointer.
MySpace is the underdog here. They will have a very hard time convincing people to join them.
I've used SoundCloud since 2008, when it was invite only and mainly known on obscure electronic music production forums. Sure, way back in the stone age musicians and producers used MySpace, but most of us were happy to get away from it as far as we could the moment an alternative appeared. SoundCloud is minimalist in nature. It focuses on the music. That's why it wins. MySpace started to look like GeoCities.
Nowadays MySpace is a wasteland, you have some big media content and thousands of dead accounts.
Arctic Monkeys were the poster child of a successful MySpace band and their last login was over a year ago.
And anyways, judging from the new look, the new MySpace still focuses on looks. Do we need another big content outlet? Shit, if you are into pop music you've probably already subscribed to VEVO's YouTube channel.
Virb tried to pull a MySpace and they failed.
Soundcloud + Bandcamp offer enough for most musicians. Add Facebook, YouTube and iTunes and most users will be happy too. Why would we need anything else?
Maybe I'm ashamed to want you back
Maybe I'm afraid you'll never stay
Thought I hated you a long long time
There was my mistake
I don't know whether to call this a gross generalization or plain wrong, but it's both.
Not so fast!
Our superpowers have detected you're using an outdated browser. That must mean:
a You don't use the Internet very often.
b You're at your parents' place on the PC they bought in 1996.
c You work for the government or a big corporation.
There's still hope. If you answered a or b, all you need to do is click on one of the beautiful icons below, follow the instructions and you'll be enjoying the new Myspace in a jiffy.
That said, I genuinely wish them the best of luck! :-)
It's great that they're trying - I used to love MySpace! But I can't see why anyone would choose to go back when other services are doing it better and your friends, family, colleagues and celebrities (and where appropriate fans and audiences) are there already.
I hate being negative about it, and I really look forward to trying it - they just have a long road ahead.
Does it not seem though that this redesign seems to be hitting the middleground of this cluster of services? It seems like this could be a very relevant move for Myspace when, as you say, most people use either soundcloud or grooveshark or instagram or tumblr or facebook or etc etc. This redesign, even if it is a concept, seems to touch upon all of these. Which mightn't attract hardcore users who need flickr or bandcamp, but it might attract everyone else who wants to need all the above. I dunno, it all seems very relevant to me.
I mean - my musician friends love bandcamp and soundcloud - why would they go back to MySpace when other sites are doing the job perfectly and the audience is there?
I just think that selling a middle ground is a lot harder than selling something brilliant.
I suppose I just think that not everybody needs, wants or cares about cool. I agree that often the average person will follow the tastemakers, but if you can't keep the tastemakers there, or it's just too out there for the average person (like crazy clothing trends, for instance), you limit yourself to just the fringe.
We may have to agree to disagree :-) It'll be interesting to follow it, though, right?
Trouble is, often big pictures and slick graphics isn't what the average person wants - they just want it to work, and work well - it's why everyone moved from MySpace to fb in the first place.
It looks really pretty, though!
I'd argue with you about big pictures and slick graphics not being what the average person wants: I think there's been a big move towards having a sense of hipness to your online identity, e.g. instagram, tumblr, even twitter for a period, etc, and it seems like this might be an accessible route towards that for the average, unhip, user. Facebook has been uncool for quite a while now, basically. And G+ doesn't even deserve a mention in terms of hipness.
I think your average person and your average hipster are very different people... I suppose we'll have to see what crowd they're going after? I can pretty much guarantee this would just confuse my folks, and I have a lot of friends who religiously use Facebook, but they do so because it's not like this.
I'm actually much more interested in a MySpace reboot than just another new "music-sharing social site".
Still, my fingers are crossed and I'm looking forward to giving it a go.
This does look like they've refocussed back to the roots (?) of MySpace and gone tailored things towards bands/music again.
Absolutely agree with the Facebook disenfranchisement. I often wonder if FB has just got too 'bitty' - would people prefer something like the super simple Facebook of yesteryear?!
(Maybe it's just me... I also signed up for an invite to WireDoo.)
These poor guys were working long hours. There were hundreds of employees, but they couldn't turn Myspace into something that 5 talented guys could make in 6 months. It was clear to me that there were a lot of politics lurking just beneath the surface.
FWIW, I think the interface looks great. However, I'm definitely not the target audience - I'm not young, nor hip, nor am all that into music. I have however done my share of user interaction and development and it seems cool AND functional, which is quite a feat in itself.
The frontend / backend was completely rewritten over the course of this year, throwing out most of everything from the old site.
That said, it's a nice concept.
Right?
As someone who never used MySpace and is a fleeting Facebook user, I would've been interested in seeing the new product and willing to sign up and see if it's improved at all.
As it stands right now, not only am I not going to use it based on this stupidity, I'm going to make sure none of the people I could've brought over from Facebook don't either.
Way to alienate people before you even finish the new design. Bravo. JT must be so proud.
> Opera user
You're clearly not the target demographic though, right?
If there's one thing I do know, Opera has a very large, very loyal following. Not sure what motivated them to simply discount these people as possible users. Not smart IMHO.
bands actively use Myspace still, that is a massive captive market. Not sure why this is getting such negative press here on HN since I'm sure Patio11 would agree that this is genius on their behalf.
The fact that the music industry is in turmoil could make for a great monetisation strategy for Myspace. Potentially with a much greater Profit than Facebook (ie Myspace may capture the music marketing/distribution problem which is still a multi-billion dollar industry). Think Google Adwords for music discovery.
I wouldnt be surprised if Justin Timberlake has an album coming out which can be downloaded through his Myspace when it comes online.
Second thought: ... Okay, I might be a little bit excited to see how this plays out.
(Particularly like the searching ideas.)
Who am I to say I want you back?
When you were never mine to give away.
I was waiting for a long, long time for you to feel the same.Edit : who's the band/singer ?
Edit 2 : my bad, just had to look closer at the player :-)
It's Heartbeat from JJAMZ
I'll pass.
If they can pull off all the changes: metro ui, new pinterest-style network, music distribution, tv integration... this may be an interesting time for Facebook.
I wish we could see this level of design work for products that aren't for hipsters and celebrities though.
From a look at Josephmark's webpage, it looks pretttty similar to We Are Hunted (http://wearehunted.com/a/#/emerging/) and The Global Mail, which are their works. I imagine the conversation went something like this:
MySpace exec: "Nice work on WeAreHunted! Can you replicate basically the same site with some venn diagrams?" Josephmark: ::shrugs:: Sure, how much?
All cynicism aside, it doesn't really matter where myspace got the idea, the video actually looks like this is executed pretty well. I hope myspace will resurrect into something cool and useful to people.
Congrats to the design and dev teams!
However, given the vertical and horizontal scrolling, there's not really any way to include static sidebar ads the way Facebook does. It'll be interesting to see what they do around advertising on the site.
We can stop competing on how many people can fit in one vid chat and start actually adding some value again.
Here's hoping there is an app eco-system with serious social channels for mobile.
Imagine if facebook would suddenly come up with a such a drastic redesign. Half of the users would probably have no idea what is happening.
I'm not sure it ever matured from there.
Being on the edge but akin to old school is actually valued in music subculture. So while Facebook becomes a tired commodity, MySpace does have a shot in getting back as a 'true skool' brand for a music social network. Think of hip crowd looking back at the 80s and 90s for inspiration.
But is looking good can make an impact?
They told the most numerous user that she is ""just"" a fan.
Now does EVERYTHING.