Can Justin Timberlake’s ‘new MySpace’ reverse the website’s decline?

Like ancient civilisations, once conquered, websites are easily forgotten; barren digital wastelands where bad leadership has allowed the competition to plunder the userbase and take the activity - and money - elsewhere.

It is rare for such a dormant, overlooked service such as MySpace to stage a fightback. But it appears that that’s exactly what the social network is planning.

The civilisation analogy is especially apt in MySpace’s case, owing to its rapid rise and dramatic decline.

For many people, MySpace was their first personal website. Where GeoCities had inspired a spate of DIY web building in the early history of the internet, it was MySpace which broke the mainstream in the mid-Noughties.

This was due, in large part, to its strong music offering (indeed, for a time the only place it was possible to listen to unsigned bands was MySpace), its gaming platform, flexible design options and the fact that Facebook was still restricted to certain university networks.

At its peak, it was snapped up for $580million by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and attracted more traffic than Google in the US.

But it steadily lost its stranglehold - and users by the million - when competition for the social space heated up. A series of failed redesigns, clunky additions and poor business deals only sealed its doom.

In essence, it neglected the most basic reason for its popularity - the all-important user experience - at a time when Facebook was branching out from the campuses and perfecting its own cleanly designed, socially-savvy offering.

The scales flipped to such a degree that MySpace has plummetted in the traffic rankings and was sold to Specific Media Group and pop star Justin Timberlake last year for just $35million. In its current form it is ugly, slow to load and besieged by fake accounts.

While Mark Zuckerberg has emerged in this time as the social media poster boy, it has been easy to forget recently that MySpace has one of its own, and this week Timberlake duly started spreading the word about a possible MySpace comeback.

At the highly suggestive URL of new.myspace.com, he posted a video previewing the site’s new look, and even enlisted his celebrity friends as beta-testers of the new product, which seems to be aimed primarily at musicians and fans.

Timberlake told The Hollywood Reporter: “I know some artists... For me, to reach out to the ones that I know, I think for now to be a beta tester, as well. I want them to feel a sense of comfortable anonymity to that.”

The new look has divided the tech blogs so far, but it has attracted praise from the very people it is looking to win back.

“I really love this style of design,” reads one of the comments on BoingBoing.net. “I think it makes great use of multi-sized and proportioned displays, and highlights the content beautifully.”

It remains unclear when it’s launching, whether all those dusty old profiles will be migrated to the new site, and whether “New Myspace” will position itself as a direct competitor to Facebook, but the fact that people are starting to talk about a MySpace revival is quite remarkable in the context of the last four years.