An Open Letter to Justin Timberlake and Tim Vanderhook
Congratulations on your purchase of MySpace! Now, as someone who genuinely misses the original MySpace experience and the friends and fans I connected with there (and is not afraid to admit it!) I humbly offer a few notes to help you move forward:
What we loved about MySpace:
Cross-connecting with other musicians and fans. Friending them and commenting on each other’s pages, even if just to say hey, what’s up! Changing our avatars and names to reflect the new songs & albums. Uploading demos of songs and getting feedback. Adding silly-ass third party widgets like Meez. Blogging and having those blogs feed other sites. And beyond that, the ability to *really* customize the page with css code. Not the moveable 2.0 widgets that were more trouble and took up more space than we wanted. But really customizable in a way that Facebook still is not. Some bands even made their MySpace page their real homepage and paid good money to real designers to do it. But mostly, we loved the direct and easy fan and musician connections. It felt like a community in the way that only Twitter does now.
What we hated:
Bad audio quality. Though it was and still is primarily a musicians’ hangout, the audio player quality always sucked compared to just about any other site. That’s how Reverbnation first got on the map, with its superior audio player, and then with its portability (embeddable superior player!). Soundcloud is quickly taking over that area, but you get it. Ugly ads were also a problem, but even worse, the autoplaying of other people’s comment-embedded widgets made some pages completely unusable. Looooong load times after the “upgrade”. The force-feeding of everyone’s minor updates when MySpace tried to be like Facebook and Twitter and everything else combined into something that no one wanted to look at anymore.
Do us a favor and do something special with this site, which has become like watching a favorite old car rust in the driveway under a new coat of paint. I really, truly hope you are able to bring it back from the brink of spectacular failure. I do believe that if anyone other than Oprah can succeed at this, you can.
Sincerely,
Mojo (Mojo’s Army)
\m/ \m/
