MySpace has always been a safe haven for artists, weirdos, and perverts to promote their personal brands. It was the go-to site for horny teens hoping to find pictures of semi-nude, barely legal co-eds in thongs. But now the site that made self-shot, flip phone profile pictures popular is living in the shadows of Facebook and Twitter.
Many MySpacers can't even remember their login password, and the ones who do are scared to revisit the online dweeb they were circa 2008--the same year Facebook's monthly visitors began to surpass MySpace's online traffic.
To say that the social networking site has struggled is an understatement. News Corp., Myspace's parent company, reported losses of $174 million last quarter in the division responsible for MySpace, and the site trails Facebook in number of users by about 300 million people. But even new Facebook-like features haven't been able to revamp the brand's image. Maybe a new corporate identity will.
Last week at Warm Gun, a one-day design conference in San Francisco, MySpace unveiled its latest re-branding gimmick, a new logo. Myspace's VP of User Experience, Mike Macadaan, says, "MySpace is a platform for people to be whatever they want, so we've decided to give them the space to do it."
The blank space is supposed to represent individuality, and users will likely have the ability to customize it with their own text and images. Like the previous logo, the lowercase "my" will remain in Helvetica font.
