Opera doesn't support websockets. I'm sure some socket.IO fans will tell me that's not a big deal, but it kind of is. modern browsers support websockets.
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.
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.
It's not about detecting features. It's about testing: When you're developing a web app, each new browser you choose to support increases your testing time: starting out developing for chrome, adding safari support usually is just a formality. adding firefox support means a couple extra hours of testing, but everything usually works. adding opera support means your tests are going to start failing, and a bunch more work.
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.
"Hey friend, it looks like you are using Opera. Beware, pal, that we don't go to the opera down here on the ranch, so there may be rough-riding ahead! Try one of these nifty browsers buddy, or sally forth into the unknown. OK, pardner?"
You can put all the disclaimers you want before a use and they will "venture forth into the unknown". However, they will ignore (if they even read/understood it) your warning and then bury you in support tickets, complain loudly to their friends, and leave you with a mess to deal with and no real clean/easy way out.
I second this... users rarely read anything & remember even less. If you let them in, then they expect it to work. Its unfortunate for Opera, but we're doing the same for our beta launch.
I agree with you that opera should support web sprockets, and I sympathize with web developers making the decision to develop for new technology and browsers that don't support it be damned. But the actual message myspace displays is pretty needlessly snarky and stupidly insulting. I also have zero faith they'll be able to update their browser detection script often enough to avoid looking like dinosaurs themselves from time to time.
It takes character and guts to stand up for something. I think MySpace can be credited for that. The snark-iness was probably meant more for ie6-7 users than Opera users.
> It takes character and guts to stand up for something.
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?
Maybe they meant to say "outdated or foreign browser" and "d. You're a freedom-hating socialist commie", seeing as it's the only browser not developed in the US? ;-)
Doesn't it seem far more likely to be indifference to a negligible market share than ignorance of Opera's existence? It's not worth their money to spend any amount of time making a custom error for "Your browser is new, but we don't support it anyway" separate from "Your browser is old and we don't support it" when 99.9% of the people seeing the message are in the latter category.
Demanding conformity from human beings (how dare you choose a different tool?) is the opposite of character, though doing it this brazenly does take guts.
Or you could just use the features you want to use and try to fail gracefully when you can't. (Old IE could be a special case, as it is solid chunk of FUBAR.)
Sure, you could do that if you had unlimited developer time and people using old browsers are an important market. but that isn't always reality, you've got to choose where to focus your efforts.
No, you don't need unlimited developer time to do feature detection. It's just good practice, after it's ingrained it doesn't take any more time than not doing it.
Don't mix "development cost" with "overall support cost".
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.
Don't provide any extra support? "Your browser is not supported/you are on your own" is much better than denying access.
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.
I understand that the HN audience finds it incredibly simple to do. My point being, go ask your family members who don't frequent HN (or sites like it) what a user-agent is.
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 think you and others are really being overly sensitive about this. Yes, they probably shouldn't have called your favourite browser outdated, but it's obvious that it was an oversight, and consequence of taking an informal tone with giving a message. A message necessitated by choosing not to support the major browser with the smallest market share in their "preview" release.
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.
There is a middle ground, it is called a simple, straight forward message, something like "We don't support your browser". No shark needed, no suggestions that the user "doesn't use the internet much" or are "at their parent's house". Though the idea of MySpace trying to put on a hipster front is hilarious in the irony. Really? MySpace still exists as an actual thing?
Except that many IE8 users don't even know what a browser is. That isn't an euphemism, they literally don't know the word "browser". There message as displayed conveys the message better than "We don't support your browser" to those people, and there are more of those people than there are Opera users.
My point wasn't that as soon as you say the word "browser" their brain's are going to shut off; with the message as presented you don't need to know anything about the word "browser" or even what a browser is or does to understand what they are saying.
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.
People don't appreciate being needlessly insulted, I can't fathom that you don't actually understand that. Your "big paragraph explaining a browser" is a strawman. They already say browser, they don't need to elaborate. They can still suggest browsers they do support, the shark just gains them nothing. You honestly think someone seeing the message they have is going to think they are cool/clever/funny/hip? When a course of action gains you nothing and has the possibility of offending potential customers/users the decision seems pretty obvious to me.
I expect most people would not care at all, with the remaining minority either grinning or groaning. I'm not surprised that you think it was ill-advised, but for so many people on HN to be offended or feel insulted because of a lousy attempt at humorously calling out users of out-of-date browsers is just a bizarre concept to me.
Yeah, I always take snarky lists like this as an attempt to be hip or edgy, it fails both attempts here and just makes me think the developer, or whoever came up with that copy, an idiot. One thing is certain, they're not in possession of any ability in the comedy realm.
Probably not, I am a tech aware, young adult with lots of disposable income and nowhere to spend it. I can see how they would prefer to target the teenage set. Though I guess that isn't their target either as they say "you are at your parents house", which would be sort of tautological if their target were teens. So maybe it is middle aged folks? Retirees?
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 upset them at all? It's not like the target users who would enjoy this sort of snark are ever going to see the message. Seems like a zero sum game to me.
Totally agreed. What annoys me the most it that they are doing browser sniffing on the server side based on the user-agent, instead of feature detection on the client side. Talk about being updated.
The Web 2.0 craze is leading us back to the "Best viewed with" insanity of the 90's.
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"
First, the web 2.0 "craze" has already gone through its growing pains half a decade ago, we're in a different era now. Second, this is a false and misleading comparison.
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.
So what exactly do you propose? That we just halt all technological innovation on the web so that people that don't feel better about having old browsers and/or computers?
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.
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).
"most of the complexity burden of the web is purely gratuitous"
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.
If your beef was with the W3C, you should have stated that in your original comment. And then do some research on what it is, how it works, and who sits on the panel before you decide to rule them all inefficient idiots.
...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.
>So what exactly do you propose? That we just halt all technological innovation on the web so that people that don't feel better about having old browsers and/or computers?
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.
Fair enough - it wasn't a totally fair logical argument and you called me out on that one - +1 for that. However, you must acknowledge that the conclusions I jumped to were far from unreasonable. Who complains about technological progress?
Me too, and I agree with you. I would be interested to hear from anybody who currently works as a professional web developer and thinks that supporting a well-defined set of browsers is a bad idea. I suspect that a lot of this negative commentary is coming from people who have no idea what kind of workload can be added by supporting an extra browser.
The issue isn't "supporting". They actively went out of their way to specifically add code blocking Opera's user-agent string. It's more work to that than to let it through and let it fail if it must.
Making choices is a part of web development and choosing not to include an audience based on the technology they use is a choice. It's perfectly valid to make that choice--even if it excludes people--but it's a choice (that should be) dependent on the audience you are trying to serve.
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.
Modern web development is pretty demanding and resource intensive as it is, add not-100%-compatible browsers into the mix and it's hell. I think that considering Microsoft pissing on everyone for over a decade with their IE compatibility issues, Myspace have done a completely reasonable decision. Consider Opera (and whatever other oddball browsers are there) as collateral damage.
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.
We've had this all the time since the 90's with Flash being required, only we couldn't tell because it was duct-taped onto all major browsers all that time.
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.).
The biggest hit to your esteem should be that there is space for a fourth browser icon there, they probably added Opera and then removed it when they realized it wasn't a modern browser after all.
I'll pass on your humbling words to the design team, I'm sure they'll appreciate your words. They put a lot of hard work into the redesign, they're not trying to be anything. What you see is a refreshing take on a social site and although I am biased because I work for the agency that designed (as a developer) it doesn't take a designer to see this is the best MySpace has ever looked.
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.
Wait, the guy's complaining about condescending browser-fail messages and you have a go at him for writing something condescending? That's entirely independent of the design (which I like).
Oh, my apologies. HN didn't show me the context in which the comment was said, so it just appeared to be a general fact-less stab. Please ignore my comment.
Isn't that the complement (in the maths/logic sense) of their target audience for the redesign? Surely they're trying to attract new users or those who've drifted/moved/run away from MySpace.
You (or someone else reaping sweet karma) already posted this comment on reddit. As a computer scientist who uses the most modern browsers, I haven't had Opera installed SINCE 2007. As a web developer, opera has always been last to implement things, even when opera had been the one to propose new features. Opera just does not have the same support for HTML5 as the ones listed. If you're going to use a Hipster's browser, don't be surprised when you're forgotten about. Also, if you're so offended, complain to the MySpace marketing team.
I can so relate. The first startup I joined post Sun was a place called GolfWeb, which was a website dedicated to Golf enthusiasts and it was, in 1995, the top dedicated Golf site on the Internet. We had all sorts of Java plans, except only a few of the people coming to the site had Java, and RealAudio plans, but the same story. The great masses were all AOL customers it seemed and not all of them had a browser that could display tables correctly!
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.
In my experience, Opera gets significant usage in non-English-speaking countries. I read at one point (several years ago, so grain of salt) that 25% of Russian users were using Opera.
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.
Yes, if you look at http://gs.statcounter.com/ and select individual countries you can see that Opera is strong in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. There are historical reasons for that (just my opinion, see bellow) and also the fact that Opera had/has Turbo - which really helps on slow connections (mobile).
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.
I use Opera Mini (or is it mobile?) on my old phone - they have a system that routes request through their own caches that downscales/downsamples images, removes cruft, etc. before the pages hit the mobile device. I imagine that means they get under-represented in hit figures (but not by that much).
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.]
Yes, the message could perhaps be targeted at Opera specifically, but what else do you want when your browser IS the minority on the web? If you've ever shipped software you know the time will come when you have to cut your list down. How do you make the justification for supporting Opera? And like notatoad says, it's not just a matter of adding some JS, you need to test, etc.
Not sure if that was sarcasm or not. What that actually says is that they're explicitly blocking Opera by the user-agent string, and haven't bothered blocking Lynx. As pointed out elsewhere in comments here, the page actually works just fine in Opera when you tell it to spoof the user-agent string to pretend it's Firefox.
Yeah, it's pretty a bad practice blocking on user agent. Re: Opera - I just think it's a pain and an unwanted cost to support Opera. Though my dislike for Opera comes mainly from having developed mobile apps for a long time and having to deal with debugging though their "enhancing" proxy.
These days I have no problem with sites who don't want to support some users, that's their call. I wouldn't recommend suggesting the users must not use the internet very often though.
Opera excludes itself, by making its software difficult for developers to support. Most people have never even heard of Opera. So why should developers bother? Where's the value?
Well if you care about majority of Ukraine and Russian users you better support Opera, I'm sure there are more countries where Opera is popular but in those 2 if has the market lead.
I've always found Opera to be innovative and easy to use. They seem to get their default styling right too.
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.
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...
The company I work for (Josephmark) was hired by MySpace to redesign the site and create something radically different. The interface you see was created by a few talented designers, the video you say was staged is definitely not staged. What you are seeing is what the new MySpace will look like when it's ready to launch. Yes, the site is focusing music - the new MySpace is going to be a social music platform because it has always and still is MySpace's biggest strength (they have access to more music and videos than anyone else), when you have more music than Spotify it would be crazy to try and target a different niche. it has been mentioned by MySpace themselves in interviews about the new site it's a music product. MySpace are not trying to compete with Facebook, if anything their new competitors are now Spotify, Last.fm and Rdio. The very fact you can login with your Facebook is proof of this enough.
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.
Thanks mate, I'll pass the praise on to the design team. I'm on the dev team here, so my involvement hasn't been as great as theirs. The response from the video seems to be pretty positive, hopefully everyone is just as impressed when the final site is ready for the public to use. I am a bit biased here because I'm proud of the work my colleagues have done, but it definitely is one of the nicest looking music products out there.
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'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.
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.
I for one can't read Facebook's timeline and that uses downward scrolling. I don't quite get why I find it so difficult. I really can't get on with it. I'm fine with one column (but two - is a complete mind warp for me.)
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.
I just wanted to chime in and say that the space that MySpace once dominated is an entirely different one now.
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?
Am i wrong in saying that Myspace seemed to stay relevant for longer than it possibly should have purely because musicians and bands seemed to have an affection for it, for whatever reason? I know that even up until recently, when i've searched for local musicians, their Myspace page is still very high in search rankings, and i still often (somehow) find myself listening to local band's music via Myspace.
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.
Musicians like myspace because you can customize your homepage. And it's accepted to send invites to random people. On Facebook you don't have either of these. Also they added music friendly features such as letting users select your tune as their homepage theme song. As a musician I've found Myspace to be invaluable.
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.
...because musicians and bands seemed to have an affection for it, for whatever reason?
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.
Let's wait and see. Keep in mind, the video is pretty frenetically cut. The video is designed to provoke awe, but I suspect the interface is less "out there" in practice.
The only functional problem with windows 8 metro I find is it's exclusiveness. I think windows 8 has a terrific UI for an application, just not for an OS. Give me windows 7 desktop where on the press of the windows key I get a windows 8 metro overlay like steam/xbox 360/ps3/etc, and I'd probably love it.
The big advantage of Myspace (for me) is that I can access the songs of bands much easier without logging in.
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.
I don't know why, but for some reason I felt that, while reading your comment, you were for some reason biased towards wanting to find faults in MySpace's announcement.
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.
> (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?)
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.
"But, I just fail to see how they are going to get a strong user base"
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.
The use of horizontal scroll in the video is probably some way from fully refined too - there was no obvious chrome to facilitate the panning, which doesn't often work well outside of touch devices.
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.
Yeah, "d - You don't usually jump through hoops to get a demo website working in your perfectly capable browser" must have been left off the list accidentally.
The preview looks great. I just don't understand why anyone would come back to something they've already moved on from to do things they're already doing elsewhere.
That said, I genuinely wish them the best of luck! :-)
It seems to me that this might strike a very relevant and "on trend" balance between the needs of the average person, hip circles, and creative circles. Furthermore, the redesign makes Facebook's recentish redesign look very clunky and amateurish; this design is very very fresh. I think it's a fairly interesting development.
I think pushing hip will be tough whilst still under the myspace banner, Timberlake or not. Perhaps a complete rebrand would have helped.
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.
Absolutely. As good as the redesign is, the Myspace brand seems like a total dead duck. It almost caused a sense of panicked inner confusion in me to see such a pretty design followed by the Myspace logo.
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.
Haha yes, it would have been a whole lot more interesting under a new banner!
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.
You're totally right, but i think just the fact that you've said "this will confuse my folks" (it'd confuse mine too) shows that change has to come at some stage in terms of the dominant social network. Maybe Myspace wont be it but, Facebook just isn't cool anymore.
Maybe the problem is it's always going to feel like a MySpace reboot under the MySpace banner? And I'm with you - something entirely fresh would be fantastic (whether that's trying to attract everyone or a more niche audience), the worry is this ends up becoming exactly as you said above - just another new music-sharing social site - that doesn't attract anyone (long term).
Still, my fingers are crossed and I'm looking forward to giving it a go.
There's a burgeoning disenfranchisement with Facebook IMO. People for whom Facebook is getting tired and old and for whom the interface is a drag may well be perfectly placed to jump [back].
This does look like they've refocussed back to the roots (?) of MySpace and gone tailored things towards bands/music again.
Bands was what MySpace did best. It'll be interesting to see if it can lure any back (or the audience for the bands - chicken, egg?).
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?!
It would be interesting to see MySpace really attack Facebook by having a really really good privacy agreement etc, but if it's too nice they'll have the same monetization issues that Facebook does.
It's all about focusing on the creative producers, Facebook still isn't the best place for those types, it's good because that's where fans are but it's not really the best tool.
Sure, I get that. But most of the people I know in bands use something else - bandcamp,soundcloud, whatever. Those who listen are using spotify, grooveshark, rdio, whatever. Photographers use flickr, instagram, designers use dribbble, etc etc. My friends all chat on facebook, twitter or g+ - the list goes on.
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.
"""But most of the people I know in bands use something else - bandcamp,soundcloud, whatever. Those who listen are using spotify, grooveshark, rdio, whatever. Photographers use flickr, instagram, designers use dribbble, etc etc. My friends all chat on facebook, twitter or g+ - the list goes on."""
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.
For most things I don't want a middle ground, though. I want spotify which beautifully plays all the albums I want, when and where I want them, and does it well. I want to look at my instagram stream in bed when I get up in the morning, use twitter at work, etc. I have no interest in mixing them.
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.
You and I, and probably everybody on HN, know what we want though, in terms of the services we use. We're a niche, and actual musicians and artists etc are a niche userbase too, and they wont stop using whatever the hot thing is in their area (soundcloud, let's say). So without sounding too flippant, if Myspace can make the average person think that all the cool people are there, that's where the average person will go, especially if it's as accessible (in terms of the breadth of things it offers) and hip as the preview suggests.
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?
If this was billed as "FooBar: Justin Timberlake's new music social network" I would have signed up for an invite instantly. However, "sign up for an invite to MySpace" seems uncompelling. It'll be just as hard for them turn around the name MySpace as it would be for a night club that has become passe.
(Maybe it's just me... I also signed up for an invite to WireDoo.)
I tentatively disagree. If the service isn't leaps and bounds ahead of the competition, I think this could be a huge flop. However, if they can actually deliver, I can imagine this generating a huge amount of interest. "The return of MySpace" is a fairly compelling story, after all - if they pull it off.
They've been working on this for awhile. I interviewed at Myspace about 3 years ago (mostly for the hell of it) and they were talking about the foundation for this interface. Their back end, from what I could tell, was a mess: C#, Ruby, Java, PHP, some ColdFusion still around...
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.
Yikes, 3 years? From scratch is where they needed to start from and it sounds like they couldn't pull the trigger until recently.
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.
I can assure you whatever position you were interviewing for 3 years ago, it wasn't for this. That was most likely for the previous reskin they did a few years ago.
The frontend / backend was completely rewritten over the course of this year, throwing out most of everything from the old site.
I'm actually pretty impressed with this both in their direction and design. Focusing on the creative producers was what they should have done in the first place.
My thoughts exactly, this is something very refreshing/futuristic and after showing to friends who are both artists/non-artists they love the new UI. Congrats myspace.
In a desktop browser? I can believe it. It's the Pinterest interface except horizontal. I see gradients, html5 video, opacity, position fixed. The only unbelievable thing about this video is the lack of loading time to load any content.
To me, Pinterest interface means random pictures and captions displayed in arbitrary sizes and order. When watching the preview video, the first thing I thought was "horizontal Pinterest".
That interface is entirely possible in a browser. Blurring the concept of software and web applications is entirely the trend that people should be pushing towards.
The Opera landing page is not just disappointing, it's downright offensive.
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.
I might not be the target demographic, but when you're trying to revive a dead horse, you would think your target demographic would include people who use any browser, not just the ones you approve of.
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.
This looks like a great way to be a social network for bands/DJs/music and potentially monetise around the sale of music/festivals/marketing-music.
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.
I completely agree. Bands have never left Myspace, and it seems finally Myspace will try to really incorporate bands/DJs/Marketing campaigns into the social network. I imagine monetization would come rather easily with this as well.
The song is beautiful and gives a romantic fleur to the endeavor. Just watched the official music video though and that made it even more oddly appropriate. Talking about an old creep stalking young teenage girls. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0okSCBqw18.
Yes. Metro as a design language is essentially a style guide that appears to be defining a large number of current sites in the way the "Web 2.0 look" did back between 2005-2009 (rounded corners, gradients, Verdana, etc.)
Yeah. I'm a UI Designer and I really like the aesthetics of this sort of interface, although I'm not totally on-board on reducing the total content on-screen in favor of endless scrolling GIGANTIC TEXT and images.
It's good for browsing but terrible for finding something specific, which is why it's a good interface for Pinterest and a terrible interface for Windows 8. It's probably a good interface for MySpace 2.0.
The big thing about it is the horizontal scrolling.. that works really well on an ipad, but not so well on the screen. This is definitely a tablet-oriented design ...
Can you explain more why? My monitor is 16:9, my iPad home button suggests is should be held 3:4, and at best is 4:3, which is not as well suited for side scrolling as modern monitors, which are wider than they are tall.
It's as big of an issue on my OSX touchpad devices, as I can scroll sideways with the same gesture I use to scroll vertically. But on any device where my primary HCI device is a mouse, it requires finding the horizontal scrollbar and click-dragging it. It's also not typically what people expect out of a website outside of the touch realm, which breaks a pretty primary rule in UI design (don't present the user with something they don't expect).
As a former MySpace employee I hope the redesign is worthwhile. As a former user I am not holding my breath. I certainly hope they threw out 100% of all the old code and started from scratch.
This site seems overly designed. It's so badly overly designed that my eyes hurt. That is why sites like facebook and twitter do well, they have predictable design that prevents a lot of rapid eye movements from top to the bottom of a screen to take in content.
Wow! If these guys manage to rebrand and capture the entertainment segment, that will be huge. They need to focus on being fun and forget everything facebook or LinkedIn and this will allow them to innovate. Also they should hit the under 24yr old market hard as this is where a lot of market share lies for new innovative products and they will have less bias against the MySpace brand name. If they succeed students will be covering it as a case study in business schools.
The site is really sexy, i like it. However I don't think it matters. Social media is built on fads. Myspace had its day, there once was a time when it was the "cool thing". I wouldn't be surprised if a few more users come back. However i'd be really surprised if it was any significant amount. The site, just like Digg, is a zombie. It is the living dead. You just can't make zombies into productive members of society again.
I'm surprised the TV part didn't get advertised yet. It's probably the most exciting part of their new service, but so far they're keeping it pretty quiet (apart from places where they try to recruit new people).
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.
As a UX designer, I was fascinated by what was actually happening behind all the fast edits and hip soundtrack, so I stayed up far too late last night writing this 4,000 word deconstruction of the new demo: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4572608
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.
This should be very interesting: I think kids between the ages of 9 and 15 have started to see FB as the social network of old people (millenials and X-ers) and are spending way more time on Pinterest etc. And Pinterest doesn't give a complete social experience. The new myspace just might become the social network for gen Y (or Z or whatever alphabet we have for them :)
An interesting note to this is that there weren't any ads on the site, which is not a surprise given it's a promo video.
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.
What I find interesting here is that it seems to have gone from generic social media site to glorified music promo site and now back to generic social media site? I thought they were going to buy soundcloud and really attempt to push the music/artist interaction boundary. Oh well, I guess we'll see.
Really nice concept. I liked the map especially. I wonder about the navigation - it would be probably cool to include a lot of keyboard shortcuts scrolling up and down.
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 am glad to see designers pushing for the horizontal scroll. IMO, the everlasting vertical scroll always bothered me as unnatural. Kudos to MySpace for pushing the envelope on the redesign. My visits to Facebook won't be the same ;).
Bullshit. Go ask a twelve year old who's going to start creating their online persona this year what Myspace is. They won't know what you're talking about.
MySpace was an exclusive club for "99-year old girls" to fawn over their favorite bands, or for older boys boys to post pictures of "hot babes" to impress others in their age group.
Meh, the kids won't care. If some popular people use it because it's way more fun and exciting than shitty old Facebook, (plus they hear the odd story about how fun the old MySpace was) then it could get it's foot in the door.
Judging by displayed design, it definitely feels more fresh than Facebook and Twitter. I see strong influence of Microsoft's metro design language as well...
History has some examples of legacy brands being revived. Mini, Hush Puppies, Pabst Blue Ribbon are some of the known examples. Forever and never is a really long time.
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.
Did Microsoft acquire Myspace? Looks like the (formerly known as) Metro interface, which is actually really smart, wouldn't surprise me in the least if Myspace got big again.
Does anybody except for musicians use Myspace still? Regardless of the answer, I'm still not sure why artists would continue using myspace in the first place.
This honestly makes me glad I regained access to my Myspace account and I'm looking forward to trying it out with my bands' pages. I can't think of anyone (bands included) actively touting their Myspace pages but it looks like JT's influence in the company may pay off afterall.
No kidding. Gonna take me some time to grok this one. My immediate reaction from only the video is that it looks beautiful but far more complicated than FB or G+ or something. Still, remarkable transformation.
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...