MySpace To Get Biggest Makeover To Date

MySpace has announced plans for a global revamp of the site as of next week.

Over the last few years social networking has exploded with the likes of MySpace and Facebook constantly competing with eachother for the top spot. It’s presumably with this in mind that the News Corp owned site is giving MySpace a makeover, which it hopes will widen the demographic of the site.

The site says next Wednesday’s redesign will be the biggest MySpace has seen to date with updates to the home page, profile editing, search tools and the MySpaceTV player being part of next week’s changes. MySpace also said more changes will follow over the coming summer months.

A common pet peeve among MySpace’s 115 million monthly users is that the homepage is far too cluttered. The site has said that next weeks redesign will see a less crowded landing page for the website and navigational links that are necessary but not as commonly used, will instead appear in a drop down menu. MySpace says that the new design is more than a facelift and that it is endeavoring to change the way users interact with the site.

New search technology is based on the open source Lucene project and will include tabbed results, which should make searching easier for users. The Washington Post reports that 12% of all online minutes in the US are spent on MySpace however, user traffic is slowly flagging and was down 15% in April compared to numbers from April of 2007.

Number one rival to MySpace, Facebook, will also be launching a new design, which it announced late last month. However, despite the fact that Facebook was first to announce design changes, it looks like MySpace may beat the it to the finish line when it comes to getting the revamped site out the door.